It was around this time that Hildy’s parents died. Perhaps they will be my ghost friends, she thought, but no—they went off to find her dead sister and left Hildy all alone.

She hatched a new idea: she would sell her parents’ house and buy a haunted one instead, which would have its own ghosts built in! So she went shopping for a new house. The real estate agent thought she was frustrating and strange (which, to be fair, she was) because every time she showed Hildy a perfectly nice house, Hildy’s only question was whether anything terrible had ever happened there, like a murder or a suicide, or better yet a murder and a suicide, and she’d ignore the generous kitchen and light-filled drawing room to go look at the attic and basement.

Finally, she found a properly haunted house and bought it. It was only after she moved in, though, that she realized the ghost that came with it was only there part-time, stopping by every few nights to rattle chains and slam doors.

“Don’t go,” Hildy said, catching up to the ghost as he was leaving.

“Sorry, I have other houses to haunt,” he replied, and hurried away.

Hildy felt cheated. She needed more than a part-time ghost. She’d gone to so much trouble to find a haunted house, but it seemed the one she bought wasn’t haunted enough. She decided she needed the most haunted house in the world. She bought books about haunted houses and did research. She asked her part-time ghost what he knew, shouting questions after him as he raced from room to room, clanking here and slamming there. (He always seemed to be late for some more-important haunting, which Hildy tried not to take personally.) He said something about “Kwimbra,” then left in a hurry. Hildy discovered that this was actually a town in Portugal—spelled Coimbra—and once she knew that, it was simple enough to track down which house in the town was most haunted. She exchanged letters with the man who lived there, in which he described being bothered day and night by disembodied screams and bottles that flew off tables, and she told him how pleasant that sounded. He thought this was strange, but also that she wrote very nicely, and when she offered to buy his house, his refusal was as gentle as could be. It had been in his family for generations, he explained, and so it had to remain. The house was his burden to bear.

Hildy was getting desperate. At a particularly low moment, she even entertained the thought of killing someone, because then their ghost would haunt her—but that didn’t seem like a very good way to start a friendship, and she quickly abandoned the idea.

Finally, she decided that if she couldn’t buy the most haunted house in the world, she would build it herself. First she chose the most haunted spot she could think of upon which to build it: the top of a hill that had been the site of a mass burial during the last outbreak of plague. Then she collected the most haunted building materials she could find: wood salvaged from a shipwreck with no survivors, bricks from a crematorium, stone columns from a poorhouse that had burned with hundreds of people inside, and windows from the palace of a mad prince who had poisoned his whole family. Hildy decorated the house with furniture, carpets, and objets d’art bought from other haunted houses, including that of the man in Portugal, who sent her a bureau from which emanated, at precisely three o’clock every morning, the sound of a crying baby. Just for good measure, she let bereaved families hold wakes in her parlor for an entire month, and then, just after the stroke of midnight in the middle of a howling rainstorm, she moved in.