There are things that are built in the skulls of man

I am awake, but the problem is that I was for most of the night. I slept a little less than four hours. It was not enough.

It's sunny outside for the first time in days. I'm enjoying that even if it means the sounds of yardwork with power tools echoing from across the street.

I appear to have rated a shout-out on Twitter from Anthony R. Cardno. That's a nice thing.

I am tired of not sleeping. It means I don't do anything else interesting, either.

Here is the thing and it will be with you for the rest of your life

As I go on disorganizedly tracking the emergence of tropes that interest me, tonight in proto-Stone Tape we have Joseph Jefferson Farjeon's Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story (1937):

"Now if, by your expression spooks and ghosts, you imply conscious emanations, aftermaths of physical existence capable of independent functioning of a semi-earthly character, well, then I probably do not believe in that sort of thing. There are others, of course, whose opinions I respect, who disagree with me. They consider that you, sir, are doomed to exist perpetually in some form or other. That is, perhaps, a depressing thought. But if, by spooks and ghosts, you imply emanations recreated by acute living sensitiveness or intelligence from the inexhaustible store-houses of the past, then I do believe in that sort of thing. Inevitably. [. . .] What is a simple gramophone record but a record of the past?" he demanded, tapping the bore on the knee. "Caruso is dead, but we can hear his voice to-day. This is not due to invention, but to discovery, and if the discovery had occurred three hundred years ago I should not have to travel to Naseby to hear Charles the First's voice—if, that is, I am to hear it. But Nature does not wait upon our discoveries. That is a thing so many ignoramuses forget. Her sound-waves, light-waves, thought-waves, emotional-waves—to mention a few of those which come within the limited range of our particular senses and perceptions—all travel ceaselessly, some without interruption, some to find temporary prisons in the obstructions where they embed themselves. Here they may diminish into negligible influences, or—mark this—they may be freed again. The captured waves, of course, are merely a fragment from the original source. Potentially everything that has ever existed, everything born of the senses, can be recovered by the senses. Fortunately, sir, there will be no gramophone record of your recent expletive; nevertheless, in addition to its mere mark on memory, your 'Bosh' will go on for ever."

Since this novel also contains psychometry (a bed, a chair, and a hammer all contain imprints of their associated deaths, imperceptible to most but distressingly present to the psychically sensitive chorus girl who makes up one-sixth of the small snowbound cast of this supernaturally tinged mystery), I'm starting to wonder if that's the actual origin of the idea of ghosts-as-recordings, generalized from individual objects to buildings and landscapes. Then again, maybe it particularized the other way round. Or they evolved independently and dovetailed. Really the problem is that I'm trying to answer this question without a deep dive into the history of parapsychology and I might have no alternative. It just interests me so much as an idea that so thoroughly permeates the field I read and write in, I can't remember where I first encountered it. Anyway, I don't just want to know when it entered parapsychology. When did it become one of the recognized literary modes of ghost?