Dummy boards are understood to have originated in Holland in the early 17th century. The fashion for acquiring and making them soon took hold and by the end of the century they began populating households throughout the continent, the British Isles and even colonial America.

Finally, Nielsen (2007) and Fénelon et al. (2011) have described the experience of presences as a social hallucination (i.e. a kind of pure perception of social agency, divorced from its ordinary sensory correlates such as a face or voice). While presences vary in body position and emotional affect, they very often feel like they have a specific identity with its own agency (irrespective of whether that identity is actually known to the perceiver), suggesting the involvement of social-cognitive processes. Fénelon et al. (2011) argue for this by pointing to the common occurrence of presences with known and familiar identities in PD, which in many cases will be people who have just left a scene (what they term ‘palinparousia’). Similarly, in presences following bereavement, the persisting identity of the perception is a clearly crucial part of the experience. The Court Dancertells the story of Yi Jin, a young woman who dances at the court of the emperor of the Joseon Dynasty. Elsie, pregnant and widowed, finds herself living in a gothic style manor house with unfriendly villagers, useless servants, one unlikable 'friend' and a whole heap of silent companions. These are just figures painted on boards but they have a tendency to move around and cause unpleasant events. They reminded me of the stone angels on Doctor Who which also only moved when you were not looking at them! As I said, spooky! This is the year of our Lord 2018, I thought to myself, this can’t possibly be where this book is going. And thankfully, it wasn’t. While the two Romani characters are treated pretty terribly in this book (and then killed) . . . . I was going to say at least they weren’t later revealed to be the cause of everything but honestly, this still isn’t a good look. So yeah, there’s that in this book. Two Romani children die because of the prejudices present at the time.This was one of those books that I had a hard time rating. Throughout my reading, I felt like it was on the verge of a 4-star-read, but I also felt like the full potential was somehow missing. However, having now finished the book I’m confident that it’s a 4-star-read. It’s an uncanny gothic novel that will mess with your mind (and maybe provide you with a few sleepless nights), and it’s the perfect autumnal read for when you’re in the mood for a psychological horror story that will creep you out but that also messes with your mind and takes its share of twists and turns. A classic of translated literature; a celebrated 18 th century French novel, and certainly one of the best classic books like Downton Abbey you’ll come across. Scandalous for its time and beloved the world over, Madame Bovaryis one of the most exciting ‘ Downton Abbey books’ that exists, in France or Britain or anywhere at all. Your forthcoming book, The Whispering Muse, publishes in February 2023. Can you tell us anything about it?

To sum it all up it was an engrossing, unsettling, suspenseful, and unforgettable read that had me on the edge of my seat in anticipation and had me on hyper alert watching out for creepy wooden figures. Highly recommend to readers who love a really good ghost story! Writing in the tradition of country house ghost stories, Laura Purcell has created a book that is unnerving and compelling in equal measure. The Silent Companions is an atmospheric gothic tale that chills the blood.”

I have always been interested in the significance of dreams. What is our brain trying to tell us, as… Sometimes, duplicate figures were produced, cut from a single outline. This explains the presence of doppelgängers in some of the historic houses we care for, including an identical set of children at Hinton Ampner in Hampshire and Chirk Castle in Wrexham. Twin maidservants, both engaged in peeling apples, can also be seen at Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire and Knole in Kent. Laura Purcell does a good job setting up all the spooky elements for this story. We loved the spooky house, intriguing journals from the past, the hidden secrets and the creepy Silent Companions that had us shuttering with their creepiness. There, we are granted a voyeuristic peek into gentrified Paris through Yi Jin’s eyes. And we are given a thoughtful story that explores the West’s perception and treatment of Eastern ‘treasures’. A political and thrilling story of love, loyalty, and belonging.

Thinking about hearing voices in this way is not necessarily new. Bell (2013) and Wilkinson and Bell (2016) have argued for social representations being key to understanding how voices are experienced and persist over time; various psychotherapeutic approaches focus on the social relations that voices seem to create (e.g. Hayward et al., 2011), and the Hearing Voices Movement itself has long argued for an understanding of the experience that involves interaction with voices as meaningful entities. A perfect read for a winter night . . . An intriguing, nuanced, and genuinely eerie slice of Victorian gothic.” Layering on thedark and creepy, thisintriguingly plottednovel is the full-blownGothic, maintaining throughoutan unsettling claustrophobic atmospheremixed with some unusual historical detail.” Granqvist, P., Fredrikson, M., Unge, P. et al. (2005). Sensed presence and mystical experiences are predicted by suggestibility, not by the application of transcranial weak complex magnetic fields. Neuroscience Letters, 379(1), 1–6.

From out of left-field we have a fantastic Korean novel which was recently translated (by our friend Anton Hur) and published in English. Why did it take me so long to read this wonderful book? It has history, mystery, horror, suspense, creepy cutout dolls, and a silent evil child. Soon as the companions entered the story, I was beyond scared. Why? I hate dolls. I hate anything that resembles dolls. Those weird staring eyes and painted faces. Just no. My oldest daughter terrorized me with her model wooden doll as a teenager until it mysterious caught on fire.