But once the hauntings start going into full swing, then the novel becomes hard to put down. Pamela, like Steff, is the first to experience strange phenomena, and Roddy, like me, placates her at first, until things start getting out of hand that no one can ignore. Macardle recounted her Civil War experiences in Earthbound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924). Macardle became a playwright in the next two decades. In her dramatic writing she used the pseudonym Margaret Callan. During this time she worked as a journalist at the League of Nations. That meant that a degree of suspense was lost - I knew from the start that something had happened and I knew, from the tone, that the Fitzgerald's had been able to put whatever had happened behind them. When the republican movement split in 1921-22 over the Anglo-Irish Treaty, MacArdle sided with Éamon de Valera and the anti-Treaty Irregulars. She was imprisoned by the fledgling Free State government in 1922, during the Civil War, and served time in both Mountjoy and Kilmainham Gaols.

The Uninvited is based on interviews with the Coombs family of western Wales, who were caught up in what has become known as the 1977 Welsh Triangle UFO Flap. Hundreds of UFO sightings were reported that year in Wales, but the Coombs' dairy farm was particularly affected, with family members seeing multiple large lights in the nighttime sky, and encountering large glowing figures described as "spacemen" in silver suits and helmets. They reported other unexplained phenomena, such as cows mysteriously vanishing and reappearing at other locations. While working as a journalist with the League of Nations in the 1930s she acquired a considerable affinity with the plight of pre-war Czechoslovakia. Consequently she differed with official Irish government policy on the threat of Nazism, Irish neutrality during World War II, compulsory Irish language teaching in schools, and deplored what she saw as the reduced status of women in the 1937 Constitution of Ireland. In between the house talk and the ghost talk there were allusions to their Irish home and it was clear that their roots and their history were important to them. I've had this older hardcopy edition of The Uninvited for several years. I remember finding it at a used bookstore in Maryland and bought it solely because I remembered enjoying the 1944 movie version starring Ray Milland and Gail Russell.It’s been a while since I’ve read a book that inspired me to stay up later than intended to read just one more chapter; certainly one of my favorite reading discoveries this year.

It was obvious there was going to be a ghost story. Roddy was telling the story and the substance of the book was a manuscript, introduced by a letter explaining that it was an account of what had happened in Devon. Will Pamela and Roddy be forced to flee their dream home or can they solve a mystery to put an angry presence to rest?

I was uneasy because I was eavesdropping there. It was an intrusion; this house was old; long before we were born it had its occupants, living and dying here. We were aliens and trespassers in their hereditary home. Now I knew that they were in possession of the house once more, their timelessness closing over our intrusion as water over a stone." A romance grows between Roddy and Stella and that complicates the story; because the house had been Stella's childhood home, because the haunting of the house had its roots in a tragedy that happened then, and because whenever the Fitzgerald's saw the possibility of a resolution they also saw the possibility of harm to Stella. Such a classic of the supernatural. I first read this book when it was referenced by a character in another ghost story I enjoyed. One of those winding paths that leads you unexpectedly to a new favorite on your bookshelf. Steff was pregnant with our daughter, but we didn't have any kids in the house. Needless to say, this freaked us both out, and we did some research on the house. The original tenant was a single mother and a kept woman of a wealthy pioneer explorer. Her daughter died in the house at 11-years-old of tuberculosis. We told our story to the lady who sold us the place, who admitted that she and her guests had also seen the little girl when living in that house, assuring us that she was sweet and harmless.