Opening paragraphs................................

     For the most wild yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief.  Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence.  Yet, mad am I not - and very surely I do not dream.  But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburden my soul.  My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of household events.  In their consequences, these events have terrified - have tortured - have destroyed me.  Yet I will not attempt to expound them.  To me, the have presented little but horror - to many they will seem less terrible than barroques.  Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the commonplace - some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than the ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.
-Edgar Allan Poe,  The Black Cat