Danger levels

The story has an author — the place or the creature does not exist.

Legends whose author is known. Some began on a forum, some in a horror-story contest, some in an advertising campaign, and then went out into the world and acquired eyewitnesses. Nothing is on their record because there is nothing to put there: neither the place nor the creature exists. White is not a reading of how dangerous they are but an honest label for which kind of entry this is.

A real place with nothing on its record.

Real places with nothing on their record — nothing that is reported to have happened to anybody. A history, a rumour, an atmosphere, a building with a past: the story is about the place itself rather than about what it does to whoever walks in. Most of the catalogue sits here, and that is the honest answer rather than a dull one.

Something is seen, and nobody is harmed.

Something is reported, and nobody is hurt by it: voices, figures, lights, cold, objects that move, cameras and engines that stop working. This is the level most hauntings actually sit at — frightening to be in, and that is all that was ever claimed.

Visitors are reported to have come to harm.

Places where visitors are said to have come to harm: chased, injured, made ill, driven off, kept from leaving. Not deaths, but somebody who went and did not come back the same.

Deaths or disappearances are attached to it.

Places with deaths or disappearances attached — one story, one list of names, one investigation that was never closed. Some have coroners' records behind them and some only a tradition four centuries old; the level says how heavy the account is, not how well it is evidenced.

And the count is still running.

Red, with the count still open. These are the places said to take people again and again — not once, and not long ago. It is the rarest level in the catalogue and it has to stay that way: a scale with a crowded top step stops meaning anything.