In 1834, a retired major of the East India Company's army heard the servant bells of his Suffolk house ring by themselves. He did not send for a clergyman. He took a notebook and recorded, for fifty-three days, which bell rang, at what hour, and which one never rang at all.

Then he published the diagram of the wiring. One hundred and ninety years later, no engineer has ever modelled it.

This book brings together twenty British cases of phenomena nobody has fully explained, and it has a single condition of entry: that a file exists. Here the paper is abundant: a scientific society publishing since 1882, four centuries of court records, and digitised local newspapers.

Which is why this is the volume in which most cases collapse. Where there are no documents, the legend survives intact. Where there are, and the criticism is published too, legends last exactly as long as it takes to compare two pieces of paper.

Every chapter also contains the boring explanation: the proven fraud, the thread, the subsidence, the lighthouse, the eel. In some cases it wins outright. In others it does not, and there they remain.

The last case is solved, and it is last on purpose.