When I first started running, last winter, it would be dark in the morning when I’d leave the house, and I took to listening to podcasts where real people would describe a supernatural event from their past. There was the woman who grew up in a very haunted house, and the boy saved from a suicide attempt by an unseen presence, and a student bedroom that its tenant said contained “pure, distilled evil”. I’d be puffing along a muddy trail as the sun clawed its way out of a hole while a sensible adult dripped another mad terror into my ears, and by the time I got home the day would have already chosen its direction.
