In the course of the night, I realised that I had to take the winding staircase to the basement to find water. The feeling lasted only for a few seconds, but I remember it with utter clarity, engraved as it is in my memory. Finkel’s work is about the time the first recorded ghosts enter history, through the Mesopotamians, whose clay form tablets offer wonderful examples. The Jungian scholar James Hollis, in Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives, finds it in the presence of the past in our lives. As Fisher says: “The eerie concerns the unknown; when knowledge is achieved, the eerie disappears.”