The third option for drawing people into a haunted house is to use scientific curiosity. Paranormal researchers are natural protagonists for a ghost story: the helplessness of rational scientists in the face of the supernatural can heighten the feeling of dread. Furthermore, ghost hunters are rarely willing to leave until a haunting has reached a truly catastrophic level. The group that braves the unknown in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) learns this lesson too late, as the house claims one of their own. In Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971), a physicist, his wife, and two mediums are hired to investigate the titular house, which corrupts them all with its malevolence.

In Devil in the Darkness (1978), Archie Roy ingeniously uses all three methods at once. Paul and Carol Wilson, en route to their honeymoon home in the Scottish Highlands, are sent off course by an unseasonable blizzard. They seek shelter at the only house they can find in the area: a sprawling and decrepit mansion, which has just been occupied by a curious and eclectic group. We eventually learn that the house is to be destroyed, and the new residents are a combination of demolitions experts, on hand to determine the best way to level the structure, and paranormal researchers, present to hunt for signs of the supernatural before the house is gone. Even when everyone learns of the danger in the mansion, the storm forces them to stay and face it. A haunting that begins with simple bumps in the night escalates until it become clear that none of the lodgers may survive their stay.

Scottish-born Professor Archie Roy (1924-2012) was uniquely qualified to write a story about scientific investigations of the paranormal. He was a stunningly accomplished astronomer, earning his Ph.D. at the University of Glasgow in 1954 and joining the faculty there in 1958. He was a prolific scientist, with over 70 scientific papers and multiple books on astronomical problems, including The Foundations of Astrodynamics (1965) and Orbital Motion (1978). As these titles indicate, he was a master of the motion of objects through the cosmos, both spacecraft and satellites (astrodynamics) and stars and planets (celestial mechanics). His understanding of orbital motion led NASA to seek his help calculating the trajectories of space probes in the 1960s; this work culminated in the 1969 moon landing of Apollo 11. In recognition of his achievements, Roy was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the British Interplanetary Society. He also had an asteroid named after him: (5806) Archie Roy, discovered in 1986.