The glossary
37 terms the archive actually uses — 32 of them mapped to a filing class or index. Definitions describe what is reported or filed, never what is true.
A
1 term- Apparition on file: apparition →
- A visible figure — full, partial or fleeting — reported by a witness. The commonest filing in the archive; the dossier records who saw it and when, not what it was.
B
1 term- Black-eyed children on file: reported anomalies →
- A modern legend class: pale children with solid black eyes who ask to be let in — a car, a doorway. The archive keeps no dedicated class; such reports route through the general anomaly file.
C
4 terms- Cemetery vs. graveyard on file: cemeteries & graves →
- A graveyard belongs to a churchyard; a cemetery stands alone as a burying ground. The archive files both under its cemeteries group and does not enforce the difference.
- Cold spot on file: cold spots →
- An area reported as inexplicably colder than its surroundings — measured or merely felt. One of the most repeated field claims, and one of the easiest to produce by accident.
- Cryptid on file: cryptid sighting →
- An alleged animal or creature outside recognized zoology. The archive files the sighting record and any physical evidence claimed — not the creature itself.
- A curse is a claimed malediction tied to a place, object or family, usually anchored to a documented wrong. A hex is the smaller, personal version — folk practice rather than legend. The curse on file is folklore; the wrong beneath it often is not.
D
2 terms- Disembodied voice on file: voices →
- Speech with no visible speaker — whispers, names called, conversation in an empty room. Audio claims are marked as claims.
- Dowsing
- Forked rods or a pendulum used to locate water, graves or, in field folklore, spirits. A practice rather than a filing — the archive records its use in investigations, not its results.
E
2 terms- Electromagnetic field meter — standard kit in paranormal investigation. Spikes are reported near claimed activity and near wiring alike; the archive files equipment anomalies without naming a cause.
- Electronic voice phenomena — recording silence for voices said to answer on playback. The practice is filed separately from any claimed capture.
F
2 terms- Footsteps on file: footsteps →
- Steps reported in empty halls, on stairs, overhead — one of the oldest and most durable claim types in the record.
- Full-body apparition on file: apparition →
- The rarest form of sighting claim: a complete human figure, detailed enough to pass for a living person until it does not. Filed under apparition reports.
G
2 terms- Ghost light on file: ghost light →
- A light with a ghost attached — the lantern of a dead switchman, the glow in a window nobody admits to lighting. Filed separately from unexplained lights, where the glow stands alone.
- Ghost town vs. former settlement on file: ghost towns & ruins →
- In this archive a ghost town is a settlement emptied to a landmark — not merely shrunk or quieted. Former villages and townsites are filed on their own terms when enough remains to document.
H
1 term- Historic designation on file: how a dossier is graded →
- Listing on an official register — a National Register property, a landmark. It certifies paperwork, not preservation, and certainly not hauntings.
I
3 terms- Infrasound
- Sound below the range of human hearing — roughly under 20 Hz — proposed as a natural cause of unease, chills and corner-of-the-eye sightings. A candidate explanation the archive notes when sources raise it.
- Intelligent haunting on file: haunting →
- Reported activity that appears to respond — answering questions, reacting to occupants, repeating on request. The label describes the report, not a finding.
- Intelligent response on file: electronic voice claim →
- An apparent answer following a question — on a recording, through a spirit box, in a pattern of knocks. Filed as a voice claim when something was captured.
L
2 terms- A story the record cannot date to a specific event but cannot discard either — kept as a retelling with variants, not history with better lighting.
- Legend tripping
- The practice of visiting a reputedly haunted or cursed site to test the legend — trespass frequently included. The folklore term for what the archive’s visitors actually do.
N
2 terms- Named ghost on file: named ghost legend →
- A haunting with a name attached — a former owner, a patient, a soldier. The record keeps the claimed identity beside what archives can confirm about the person.
- Night marchers on file: night marchers →
- Hawaiian tradition of processional spirits — dead warriors walking old paths. Customary protocol is to lie face down and not look; the archive files the tradition and the encounters alike.
O
1 term- A sphere of light in photographs — usually flash-lit dust or moisture. The archive files anomalous photographs as photographs; the orb is the commonest artifact inside them.
P
5 terms- Phantom hitchhiker on file: phantom hitchhiker →
- The road legend under another name — a passenger picked up who leaves before arrival, often traced to a grave or a fatal date. Filed separately from the vanishing-hitchhiker class where the source draws the distinction.
- Phantom music on file: phantom music →
- Music with no source — a piano after hours, singing in a closed chapel, a fiddle on an empty road. Often the most fondly held claim attached to a place.
- Phantom smell on file: phantom smell →
- A scent tied to a presence — pipe smoke, perfume, flowers in a sealed room. Hard to photograph and impossible to archive; the dossier records who reported it.
- Phantom vehicle on file: phantom vehicle →
- A vehicle reported where none should be — headlights that vanish in the mirror, a train heard on a dead line, a carriage on a modern road.
- German for "noisy ghost" — reports of objects displaced, thrown or rearranged. The dossiers record what moved, who said so, and whether anyone checked the pipes first.
R
1 term- Residual haunting
- The theory that a site replays a past event like a recording — no intelligence, no interaction, residual energy only. The archive keeps no residual claim class; the distinction matters to theory, not to filing.
S
4 terms- A structured attempt to contact the dead — a table, a medium, a room kept dark. Filed where a source reports one producing claimed communication.
- Shadow person on file: shadow figure →
- A dark, human-shaped silhouette reported without features — one of the most repeated forms in the modern record and one of the least substantiated.
- Spirit box on file: electronic voice claim →
- A device that sweeps radio frequencies for fragments claimed as spirit speech. Captures are filed as electronic voice claims.
- Spooklight on file: unexplained lights →
- A recurring light over a fixed point — a road, a valley, a hollow — that resists settled explanation. Regional names vary; the filing class is unexplained lights.
U
1 term- An unidentified object or craft reported by an observer who could not name it. The archive keeps these separate from creature and ghost claims, alongside any official response on record.
V
2 terms- Vanishing hitchhiker on file: vanishing hitchhiker →
- The classic road legend: a passenger picked up who leaves before arrival, often traced to a grave or a fatal date. Folklore scholarship calls it a migratory legend — the same story filed at different roads.
- Vortex on file: portal vortex →
- A claimed point where the ordinary thins — energy said to concentrate at a site. Filed rarely, under portal and vortex claims.
W
1 term- Witching hour
- The hour after midnight traditionally assigned to heightened activity. A schedule rather than a filing — the archive timestamps reports, not omens.
A note on usage
These terms belong to two different vocabularies. Some — apparition, EVP, cold spot — describe classes of report the archive keeps on file, and each links to the dossiers carrying it. Others — legend tripping, the witching hour, dowsing — describe the culture around the record rather than anything in it. The distinction is deliberate: a term earns an "on file" link only where the archive has a place to put it.