Jon Day

In​ 1991 Jeffrey Stambovsky sued the previous owners of his house in the village of Nyack, New York for failing to disclose that it was haunted. Stambovsky, an out-of-towner, argued that locals had known for years about the ghosts living in 1 La Veta Place: a couple dressed in 18th-century clothing, a naval lieutenant from the Revolutionary era and a poltergeist who would rattle beds in the...

Around a year ago​ a rat died in my kitchen. The first thing I noticed was the cloud of bluebottles flying drunkenly against the window. Then there was the smell, which was fetid and slightly sweet. It took me a while to find the source, and when I eventually pulled up the floorboards there was nothing left of the rat but a shrivelled sack of skin and fur, its tail a mangy question mark. I...

Around​ 150,000 Dutch Jews were living in the Netherlands when Germany invaded on 10 May 1940. Over the next five years, 107,000 were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. After the war, only 5000 returned home, where they were often met with indifference, if not hostility. Some were presented with bills for unpaid taxes or found that their homes had been repossessed. Others were told...

It​ wasn’t immediately obvious, arriving at Alexandra Palace, that there was a sporting event taking place. The men (they were nearly all men) queuing up outside looked as if they might be there for a model railway convention, or an IT conference. It was a Sunday evening in January, and I had come to watch the evening session of the MrQ Masters snooker final, one third – along...

Matthew McNaught was, and to a certain extent still is, drawn to the homespun, anti-institutional community he found in the church. Immanuel, as he describes it, was fire and brimstone, but it was also ‘the sound of around a hundred people singing more or less in tune. It was baptisms in the River Itchen, picnics on the South Downs, praying in tongues in suburban living rooms.’