Haunted houses are injurious to health. From his haunted rocking chair, Ruskin Bond takes you on a goose-pimply tour of some famous haunted houses in fiction. With few exceptions, the occupants of the houses in these stories have come to an unpleasant sometimes messy end. Ghosts resent begin disturbed. They are fussy about who they must have as a neighbor. There is Thurnley abbey, with its terrifying midnight apparition; M R James' haunted doll's house: Hugh Walpole's sinister staircase; and the old manor houses whose hauntings are investigated by Flaxman Low, the Sherlock Holmes of the supernatural. And there's Bram Stoker, who gives Dracula the night off and replaces him with an equally terrifying hanging judge.