In this class, we focus on literature of investigation and the uncanny–tales of people who set out to document, solve, and otherwise quantify things whose existence is monstrous, macabre, ephemeral, unheimlich, or downright impossible. Tales of hauntings, folklore, hidden doorways, family secrets, and histories of violence–whose disavowal only serves to make them ever-present–serve as the foundation for the texts we will examine in this course, read alongside a longer history of ideas from thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, and others who have attempted to put a language and a concept to feelings of creeping unease (and dread familiarity) that come from walking down a long, dark hallway in the middle of the night, of laughing at a ghost story that nevertheless keeps you awake for hours afterwards, and the feelings attached to those peculiar sorts of recurrent nightmares that–if one dreams too long, and too deep–being to feel even more real than the waking world.