There is a dilapidated house standing in the fields behind my house. It always scared my children a little, while holding a certain magnetic pull for them as well. We used to call it the witch's house. It looks old and tumble-down, but that's charming too, and I'm always reminded of it whenever I drive past an empty cottage somewhere in the west of Ireland - another witch's house.

Uncanniness was first explored psychologically by Ernst Jentsch in a 1906 essay, 'On the Psychology of the Uncanny'. Jentsch defines the uncanny as: being a product of "intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.