A very good "haunted house" story, and my first time reading Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873). Years before the "present-day" narrative, a Judge Horrocks, who'd earned a reputation as the "hanging judge" or "the hangin'est judge that ever was known in Ireland" had ended his life by hanging himself. This was in an old Dublin house, to where the narrator and his cousin Tom Ludlow move, as it's close to their lecture halls and amusements and also, since the building is owned by Tom's father, they can lodge there so long as it remains unlet. The young men are then haunted to the brink of insanity.
These lines stood out:
"One of the most remarkable phenomena connected with the practice of mendacity is the vast number of deliberate lies we tell ourselves, whom, of all persons, we can least expect to deceive. In all this, I need hardly tell you, Dick, I was simply lying to myself, and did not believe one word of the wretched humbug. Yet I went on, as men will do, like persevering charlatans and impostors, who tire people into credulity by the mere force of reiteration; so I hoped to win myself over at last to a comfortable scepticism about the ghost."
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