A dozen Catholic priests on holiday in Rome sit up after dinner and tell each other, as professionals, what they have actually met: a possession, a house that will not be blessed, a deathbed that went wrong. Benson was the Archbishop of Canterbury's son, and his conversion to Rome in 1903 was a public scandal; here he uses the priest's clinical tone to make the supernatural sound like case notes. Sixty plates of moonlit coasts, church interiors and ruined castles by painters including Knud Baade and Giacomo Favretto give these clerical tales the haunted, half-lit atmosphere they demand.