I remember as a child having a season in which I was terribly afraid of nighttime. And I wasn’t young child, I was a nine or eleven year old —old enough to read and have my own bedroom. The strange thing is that these fears were not the result of being exposed to terrifying images: I was not allowed to watch horror films, most tv shows that aired at night, play Dungeons and Dragons, or even read things like Harry Potter. I was, in some sense, sheltered, like a little hobbit child of the North Farthing (arguably the safest part of the Shire). Where then did these phantoms, terrors, nightmares, and hauntings come from if not from the subconscious recollection of images to which I had been introduced?

The answer is terrifyingly simple...