This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

When you ask someone whether they have ever seen a ghost, you are asking them whether they believe in the inexplicable. Some people are more accustomed to the idea than others: In different folklores, throughout history, ghosts appear as omens and lost spirits; they signify regret, pain, open endings.

Then there are the ghosts that haunt not a culture, but a person. Perhaps the earliest and most extensive collections of those stories in The Atlantic’s archives were authored by H. B. K., who compiled two oral accounts of supernatural incidents in the 19th century. One story came from her Protestant minister in France, who described a house once inhabited by hi

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