Blind Willie Johnson recorded “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” in Texas in 1927 with little more than slide guitar, humming and a lifetime of gospel tradition. Fifty years later, NASA chose that wordless blues lament to help explain humanity to whoever might someday find Voyager beyond the Solar System.

The history of the Ouija board begins not with demons but with Victorian Spiritualism, Baltimore entrepreneurs and a remarkably successful 1891 patent for a “toy or game.” What began as a faster way of receiving messages from the dead became a mass-market novelty, psychological experiment and eventually one of horror culture’s most recognisable objects.

The Wineville Chicken Coop Murders became so notorious that a small California community eventually abandoned its own name. Behind that extraordinary decision lies Gordon Northcott’s ranch, a missing boy named Walter Collins and a case whose strange afterlife eventually reached Hollywood.