How a dossier is built
The pipeline below has run 3,516 times. Every dossier — from a one-line roadside grave to a hundred-filing asylum — is assembled the same way, from the same fields, under the same rule: the record separates what is documented from what is merely said. The reader-facing version lives in how evidence works; this page is the machinery underneath.
The pipeline
- 01
The index record
Every dossier begins as one row in the atlas index: a slug, a name, a type, a jurisdiction (state, county, city), a coordinate status (ck — exact, city-level, county-level) and an access class. The index says a place exists and where it files; it says nothing else.
- 02
The detail file
Each index row opens into its own detail file — one JSON document per slug under the place registry — carrying the fields a summary cannot: aliases, year_built / year_opened / year_closed / year_demolished, designation, ownership, access_notes and research_notes.
- 03
The filings
Dated material lands as typed records, not paragraphs: history facts, events, claims, legends, entities, investigations and encounters. Claims classify under claim_types (apparition, voices, cold spots); entities are filed as alleged and kept apart from documented persons.
- 04
Evidence grading
Every claim, fact, legend and investigation carries an evidence class from the ladder below, plus a source — name, url, publisher, type and an authority grade. A claim may also carry a conflicting_source and variants tellings; nothing gets averaged into one voice.
- 05
The story
Only after the filings exist is the story written — the long-form narrative at the top of each dossier, composed from the sourced material, not beside it. A quality score and a stage flag record how far the file has travelled; many dossiers are openly research checkpoints.
The evidence ladder
Every filing carries exactly one evidence class, graded by the strength of its paper — strongest provenance first. The grade describes the documentation, never the ghost: a beautifully sourced legend is still a legend.
- 01Verified history
A primary or authoritative record stands behind the filing — government registers, archives, official site histories. The strongest shelf in the building.
- 02Documented legend
The story can be traced to a published or recorded telling. What is verified is the legend, not its contents — the telling itself is the fact on record.
- 03Local folklore
Circulating in local tradition with no single identifiable origin. Filed because the community files it.
- 04Reported experience
A named or described witness reports something firsthand. The report is documented; the cause is not.
- 05Investigation claim
Findings asserted by a paranormal investigation group — filed as a claim about an investigation, not a finding about physics.
- 06Media reported
Carried by a newspaper, broadcast or established publication. The reporting is real; what it reports remains what it reports.
- 07Anecdotal
Secondhand or casually repeated accounts — the friend-of-a-friend shelf.
- 08Internet rumor
The earliest traceable life of the story is online. Treated with extra suspicion, filed anyway.
- 09Disputed
Sources actively conflict, or the claim has been publicly challenged. The dispute is part of the record.
- 10Unverified
On file, but no solid provenance has been established. The honest bottom rung.
Labels as rendered: Verified history · Documented legend · Local folklore · Reported experience · Investigation claim · Media reported · Anecdotal · Internet rumor · Disputed · Unverified. Which classes actually carry the archive's weight is tallied on the citation registry.
Two accounts on file
Merging sources means inheriting their disagreements. When one registry calls a site open to the public and another calls it posted private — when the cornerstone reads 1847 and the county history says 1852 — the file does not average them. Each clash is logged in conflicts as afield_name, theexisting_value, and theincoming_value, and both stay on the page.
The same holds inside a claim: conflicting_source keeps a second account attached to the filing it contradicts, andvariants preserves retellings rather than flattening them into a single canonical ghost. The full ledger of open disputes is kept at the contested record — it is one of the more honest pages on the site.
What a dossier is not
Not proof of a haunting
A dossier records that a story exists, is said about a real place, and is documented to a stated degree. Claims are filed, not endorsed — nothing here certifies that anything supernatural occurred.
Not permission to visit
The access field is a filing, not an invitation. Hundreds of dossiers are private, restricted or unknown, and no access note on this site overrides a fence, an owner or a posted sign. Never trespass.
Not finished
Dossiers carry a stage and a quality grade precisely because they are research checkpoints. Thin files are not failed files; they are unfiled ones, awaiting deeper work.
Not a verdict machine
Where sources disagree, the archive does not pick a winner — disagreements live in the conflicts field and stay on the page. The contested record is a feature of the evidence, not a bug in it.
Corrections and amendments
A correction is a source with a better claim. Every dossier is its own citation of record — the sources on each file are public, the open disputes are listed, and the registry of every work the archive cites lives at the bibliography. Where a filing is wrong, the fix is better paper, not quieter paper.
Amendments are continuous: each dossier shows its own amendment date, the newest changes surface on the latest page and through the RSS feed, and the running totals are kept honest on the numbers page. For corrections or questions of record, the dossier page itself is the citation — the press file carries the boilerplate.
Method on file since the first dossier · amended October 2, 2026