The Haunting of Toby Jugg

The Haunting of Toby Jugg is a novel by the English writer Dennis Wheatley, published in 1948. It combines the occult material he returned to throughout his career with the situation of a disabled airman recovering from the last stages of the Second World War.

Toby Jugg is the heir to a fortune and stands to inherit his grandfather's business empire on his twenty-first birthday, but his mother died in childbirth and his father and grandfather were killed in an aircraft accident, which leaves his uncle Paul and aunt Julia as his only living relatives. A bombing raid on Cologne ends with Toby shot in the back and paralysed from the waist down, and in the year that follows a shadowy presence with too many legs comes to him at night, which he first takes for an hallucination on the way to madness and then for a plot against his inheritance.

Wheatley tells the story as Toby's diary and moves him from his relatives' house to Llanferdrack House in Wales, where the man running the estate turns out to be a member of a Satanist brotherhood and where the attacks on Toby begin to take physical form. A television adaptation, The Haunted Airman, followed in 2006.