Ghosts & Haunted Places

Yesterday - Ghost novels - Today - Ghost nonfiction!

Dark World: Into the Shadows With the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew by Zak Bagans and Kelley Crigger - It's easy to say ghosts exist or don't exist. Anyone can do that. Trying to figure out the why or what is a different story. Paranormal investigator Zak Bagans, host of the popular Travel Channel series Ghost Adventures, pulls from his years of experience with paranormal activities and unexplained phenomena to provide an evenhanded look at a divisive subject. In Dark World, regardless of whether you believe in the afterlife or not, Zak does his best to find and share answers to the phenomena that people encounter.

Ghost Files: The Collected Cases from Ghost Hunting and Seeking Spirits by Jason Hawes & Grant Wilson with Michael Jan Friedman - In this hair-raising omnibus, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, founders of The Atlantic Paranormal Society (T.A.P.S.), reveal the memorable and spine-tingling cases featured in their smash-hit collections, Ghost Hunting and Seeking Spirits. From their never-seen-on-television adventures as budding paranormal investigators to the behind-the-scenes accounts of heart-pounding supernatural encounters featured on their popular show, these fascinating and frightening real life tales will keep you up at night!

The Ghost Hunter's Survival Guide: Protection Techniques for Encounters with the Paranormal by Michelle A. Belanger - Chasing the unseen has become a popular pastime but most ghost hunters are unaware of the very real harm that can be done by malevolent human spirits, non-human entities, and a host of astral parasites. This guide from medium and paranormal investigator Michelle Belanger features proven protection techniques-and for the skeptics out there, highlights how the methods also work on a psychological level. You'll get straightforward instruction on arming yourself with an array of essential techniques:

Perform psychic cleansings

Remove attachments

Protect dreams

Shield spaces

Ward to protect a home

Remove and bind spirits

Cope with spirit possession

Woven through each chapter is a gripping, true account of a ghost investigation conducted by Belanger, which provides a framework for understanding when to use these potent defense strategies.

The Ghost: A Cultural History by Susan Owens - This book delves into a wealth of literary and artistic sources, including illuminated manuscripts, woodcut engravings, magic-lantern slides, paintings, prints, poems, novels and stories, providing a fresh take on a subject that has fascinated us for centuries. In this broad cultural history, Susan Owens reveals what these spirits and apparitions can tell us about our culture and about ourselves, and explores how ghosts have inhabited a wide range of roles from medieval times to the present day. A dazzling range of artists are featured, including William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Paul Nash and Jeremy Deller, alongside writers such as John Donne, William Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters.

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey - Colin Dickey is on the trail of America's ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and "zombie homes," Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Some have established reputations as "the most haunted mansion in America," or "the most haunted prison"; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget.     

       With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living -- how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made -- and why those changes are made -- Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved.

       Spellbinding, scary, and wickedly insightful, Ghostland discovers the past we're most afraid to speak of aloud in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark. 

Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession With the Hideous and the Haunting by W. Scott Poole - Salem witches, frontier wilderness beasts, freak show oddities, alien invasions, Freddie Krueger. From our colonial past to the present, the monster in all its various forms has been a staple of American culture. A masterful survey of our grim and often disturbing past, Monsters in America uniquely brings together history and culture studies to expose the dark obsessions that have helped create our national identity. Monsters are not just fears of the individual psyche, historian Scott Poole explains, but are concoctions of the public imagination, reactions to cultural influences, social change, and historical events. Conflicting anxieties about race, class, gender, sexuality, religious beliefs, science, and politics manifest as haunting beings among the populace. From Victorian-era mad scientists to modern-day serial killers , new monsters appear as American society evolves, paralleling fluctuating challenges to the cultural status quo. Consulting newspaper accounts, archival materials, personal papers, comic books, films, and oral histories, Poole adroitly illustrates how the creation of the monstrous "other" not only reflects society's fears but shapes actual historical behavior and becomes a cultural reminder of inhuman acts.

The New England Grimpendium: A Guide to the Macabre and Ghastly Sites by J. W. Ocker - A rich compendium of macabre and historic New England happenings, this travelogue features firsthand accounts of almost 200 sites throughout New England. This region is full of the macabre, the grim, and the ghastly--and all of it is worth visiting, for the traveler who dares! Author J. W. Ocker supplements directions and site information with entertaining personal anecdotes.Topics include: Legends and personalities of the macabre, Infamous crimes and killers, Dreadful tragedies, Horror movie locales Notable cemeteries and gravestones Intriguing memento mori Classic monsters

The Other Side: A Teen's Guide to Ghost Hunting and the Paranormal by Marley Gibson, Patrick Burns, and Dave Schrader - It used to be you needed a crystal, a psychic, or a Oijia board to make contact with the spirit world. So who would think science would make it possible for just about anyone to experience a ghostly connection? Cameras, recorders, computers, magnetic field readers and other scientific means are now the tools of the trade. But there's so much available, how does the average teen weed through it all to create the best possible ghost hunting team? Here to help sort it all out are three oftoday's leading investigators of the field.Together, Patrick Burns, Dave Schrader, and Marley Gibson have more than ten years of experience. They've put together this guide to impart their knowledge and wisdom on to the next generation of ghost hunters.

What's included:

How to set up a ghost hunting team

The equipment needed and how to use it

Where to look for spirits

Safety, safety, and more safety

Ghost hunting is equal parts science and belief. Patrick, Dave, and Marley are here to help with the science part.

Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places by Brad Steiger - The culmination of Brad Steiger's 50 years of paranormal research, this book is a bold telling of true ghost stories and first-person encounters with the supernatural. Arranged in 29 topical chapters, it covers every sort of ghost and haunting, including: hanuted houses, poltergeists, shadow beings and possession. Real Ghosts delves into the true scary stories from both historical documents and personal accounts. Such stories and compelling evidence of both the existence of ghosts and proof of hauntings will entertain, induce chills, and make the doubtful believe. 

Weird Encounters: True Tales of Haunted Places compiled by Joanne Austin - Scarier and stranger than any multiplex horror movie, Weird Encounters features more than 75 supernatural stories contributed by writers from across the country. Compiled by Joanne M. Austin, editor of the hugely successful Weird Hauntings, this chilling anthology tells of "Historic Haunts,” and "Hostel Environments” and conjures up a host of phantasms, paranormal pranksters, and devilishly destructive spirits-like the deceased owner of an Illinois inn whose ghost gets fresh with his female patrons and the bridge in Mississippi that's haunted by a serial murderer and his victims.