The curses, omens and legends of great families: the screaming skull that will not stay buried, the room nobody may open, the blood stain that cannot be scrubbed out, the pact with the devil, the death omen that appears before an heir dies, the romance of disguise and the disappearance nobody explained. Thiselton-Dyer gathered them from family histories and county records, and tells each without pretending to decide how much of it is true. Sixty plates of painting, from Raeburn to Turner, picture the ancestral seats, portraits and monuments where such curses were said to cling.