On 17 March 1892, neighbours in Rhode Island exhumed three women of the same family to find out which of them was feeding on the surviving brother. A doctor was present. He examined the body and said out loud that there was nothing abnormal about it.

They took out her heart, burned it on a stone in the graveyard and gave the boy the ashes to drink. He died six weeks later.

This book brings together nineteen American cases of phenomena people consider unexplained, and it has a single condition of entry: that a file exists. Here the files are enormous: the complete court record of 1692, three hundred pages of federal reports, one hundred and eighty hours of tape, four thousand three hundred and seventy-five typed pages in an archive open to the public.

Eleven of the nineteen cases are explained. And not one of them has stopped circulating.

In 1979 a federal judge stated that the most famous book of the genre was fiction. The lawyer who helped manufacture it confessed as much to a magazine. Forty-seven years later, that house is still the most famous haunted house in the world.

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