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    Haunted America FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Most Haunted Houses, Cemeteries, Battlefields, and More
    Haunted America FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Most Haunted Houses, Cemeteries, Battlefields, and More
    Haunted America FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Most Haunted Houses, Cemeteries, Battlefields, and More
    Ebook610 pages8 hours

    Haunted America FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Most Haunted Houses, Cemeteries, Battlefields, and More

    By Dave Thompson

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    About this ebook

    Take a fast-paced survey of the ghosties, ghouls, and associated denizens of the country's haunted history with Haunted America FAQ. Tracing local ghost stories back to Native American legends and then forward through horror tales both ancient and modern, the book revisits some of the best known haunted locales, as well as some of the most obscure creepy places, in America.

    Delving deep into the cultural history of American hauntings, Haunted America FAQ includes chapters on ghostly books, movies, and television. Also included is an A-Z of reality-TV ghost hunts and a state-by-state gazetteer of haunted spots.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRowmanLittlefield
    Release dateJan 1, 2000
    ISBN9781495046018
    Haunted America FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Most Haunted Houses, Cemeteries, Battlefields, and More
    Author

    Dave Thompson

    Dave Thompson is the author of over one hundred books, including best-selling biographies of the Sweet, David Bowie and Sparks

    Read more from Dave Thompson

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    Reviews for Haunted America FAQ

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      I have to admit that I am a sucker for ghost stories; the more historic the better which is why I requested to read this book. This must have been a huge undertaking for the author. While some of the history is very blunt and short; others have a lot of historical background to them which I enjoyed immensely. I just googled for more information on the others that intrigued me. I was a little taken aback by the format of writing at first. I had thought it would be like another book I had read about haunted sites in England where it had a paragraph or more for each site and actual directions to and from one site to another. Once I got into the style of writing, I was drawn in quickly. The format reminds me of sitting next to someone near a fire while they tell ghost stories. I liked the style very much.
      Another welcome change for me was the fact that often the author would take a "breather" and discuss different areas of ghosts and hauntings such as spiritual photography, the history of the entire genre, and also a comprehensive discussion on some of the literary masters of horror fiction (I took many notes). All in all, I really enjoyed this read and would recommend it to anyone who loves learning about not only haunted places in America but also some of the history surrounding the genre.
      I received a copy of this book from the publishers via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
    • 5/5
      I had to read this one when it came out. I love horror and Halloween. This book was very entertaining and it did not let me down. Normally the books seem to rehash most of the ghost stories, but a good majority of them were new, so that was nice. I am happy to see some more recent information and I like the way it was presented. There was just enough story telling and then some small listing of locations and a brief description. I thought this was a brilliant layout and very well planned. I'm not sure if I have seen this before, but I am going to say no. Not very many pictures, but that is ok. There is a lot of information to be given, so it is well spread out. Overall I think it is my favorite ghost book of this date. I do not say that lightly either, since Halloween is Christmas to me. My kids get Christmas and I get Halloween! LOL! Anyways, for those that are looking for a great read I highly recommend this book!
    • 4/5
      I did not expect that! I think what I assumed this would be was a sort of travel guide, just a listing of locations reputed to be spooky and maybe a squib as to why. And there was that aspect – just not as organized as I expected – but there were also alternating chapters which explored hauntings by theme: haunted ships, haunted inns, haunted hospitals, etc. The negatives: it's a bit scattershot. Instead of a kind of easily referenced listing, the states are broken up into alphabetical groups of two or three, each state yielding a handful of locations, along with a sentence or two on the type of haunting each location is known for. Those alternating chapters addressing types of hauntings It's not very user-friendly as a guide to where one should go to have the best chance of encountering a ghost; nor is it a comprehensive survey of what kind of ghosts are where and why or anything like that. (All of which would be very interesting, by the way.)The usual disclaimer: I received this book via Netgalley for review.

    Book preview

    Haunted America FAQ - Dave Thompson

    Copyright © 2015 by Dave Thompson

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

    Published in 2015 by Backbeat Books

    An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

    7777 West Bluemound Road

    Milwaukee, WI 53213

    Trade Book Division Editorial Offices

    33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042

    The FAQ series was conceived by Robert Rodriguez and developed with Stuart Shea.

    Printed in the United States of America

    Book design by Snow Creative Services

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Thompson, Dave, 1960 January 3–

    Haunted America FAQ : all that’s left to know about the most haunted houses, cemeteries, battlefields, and more / Dave Thompson.

    pages cm. — (FAQ series)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-1-4803-9262-5

    1. Haunted places—United States. I. Title.

    BF1472.U6T469 2015

    133.10973—dc23

    2015029851

    www.backbeatbooks.com

    To all the bumps in the night and creaks on the stairs

    Contents

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction

    1. A Very Old Story Indeed: The First Ghosts in History

    2. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Alabama to Arkansas: An Artful Assortment of Astonishing Activity

    3. New World, Old Fears: What Was America’s First-Ever Ghost Story?

    4. The Ghostly Gazetteer: California to Colorado: A Bewildering Bagful of Belligerent Beasties

    5. Not Dead, but Definitely Buried: America’s Most Haunted Cemeteries

    6. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Connecticut to DC: A Chilling Churchyard of Chattering Chimeras

    7. A Ghost Town: And the Ghosts That Haunt It

    8. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Florida to Georgia: A Dismal Dungeon Draped with Darkness

    9. Apparently I Didn’t Wake Up This Morning: The Ghost of the Blues

    10. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Hawaii to Illinois: The Excessive Evil of Eerie Eclectics

    11. Knock Knock—Who’s There? America’s First Poltergeists

    12. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Indiana to Iowa: A Fulsome File of Fearful Figures

    13. Riding the Roller Coaster of Doom! All the Fun of the Fair

    14. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Kansas to Kentucky: A Grisly Grounding in Groaning Graves

    15. A Light in the Night: For Those in Peril on the Sea

    16. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Louisiana: An Unwholesome Household of the Hairiest Horrors

    17. The Hospital of Lost Souls: Or, I Told You I Was Sick

    18. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Maryland to Massachusetts: Icicle Imagery and Ichorous Atmospheres

    19. Promised Land Ahoy! The Ghostly Queens of the Seas

    20. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Missouri to Montana: A Jangle-Nerved Journey of Jelly-fied Jaws

    21. Life After Death in the White House: The Ultimate Presidential Veto

    22. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Michigan to Mississippi: Katatonic Kreatures to Kurdle Your Kooties

    23. Do Robots Have Souls? The Literal Ghosts in the Machines

    24. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Nebraska to Nevada: Leering Landlords and Loathsome Lividities

    25. Time, Gentlemen, Please! Or, I’ll Have Some of What He’s Drinking

    26. The Ghostly Gazetteer: New Hampshire to New Jersey: Man-Eating Monsters and Moaning Mysteries

    27. Most Desirable Residence for Sale: Or, There’s a Ghost in My House

    28. The Ghostly Gazetteer: The Carolinas and the Dakotas: Nightmarish Numbness to Niggle Your Nerves

    29. Plantation Daze: A Southern Way of Death

    30. The Ghostly Gazetteer: New Mexico to New York: Oddities and Obscurities, but No Orbs to Observe

    31. Haunted Hotel Rooms: Or, A Room with a Woooooooooo

    32. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Ohio to Oklahoma: Prepare to Panic as the Polts Perform

    33. Sexy Spirits: And the Most Beautiful Ghosts in the World

    34. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Oregon to Pennsylvania: Queer Quonundrums to Make You Quake

    35. We Admit They Exist: But What Do They Want?

    36. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Rhode Island to Tennessee: Run from the Roars of the Raucous Nightwalkers

    37. Spirits Having Flown: Conan Doyle, Cameras and Codswallop

    38. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Texas to Vermont: Spiteful Spirits and Sickening Stenches

    39. Torrid Tales and Plangent Poetry: The Ghost on Page and Screen

    40. The Ghostly Gazetteer: Virginias to Wyoming: Terminating Our Travels, Tired but Triumphant

    Epilogue: Do You Believe in Ghosts . . . Yet?

    Appendix: Paranormal Television Investigations

    Selected Bibliography

    Acknowledgments

    First and foremost, a medieval boneyard full of thanks to all the family and friends who walked through walls to bring me their favorite tales of ghosties, ghoulies, long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night.

    Especial thanks to Amy Hanson, who not only grew up in a house with a haunted parlor, but then moved to an apartment with a haunted bathroom. Seriously! The ghost used to drop pennies into the bathtub. He could at least have given me twenties, she says.

    To Chrissie Bentley, whose experiences in a haunted former fairground were probably not what the ghosts expected; Jo-Ann Greene, who kept a level, skeptical head throughout this book’s development; the old lady in the farmhouse basement (enough said); and everybody’s favorite cold spot. To Chloe Mortenson, who is now perfectly placed to investigate the legends of the screaming spirit that haunts her college museum, the rattling chains in its Old Main Hall, and the bad-tempered boy in the freshman’s residence hall. And to J. R. Pepper, not only for her marvelous photographs, but for her explanations, too.

    To all at FAQ Central Headquarters, but most especially John Cerullo, Marybeth Keating, Wes Seeley, Jessica Burr, and Gary Sunshine; to the tireless staff at a nation’s worth of haunted attractions for always knowing when the gullibility bone is about to break.

    And to Karen and Todd; Linda and Larry; Betsy, Steve and family; Jen, Gaye and Tim, Oliver, Trevor, Toby, Barb East, Bateerz and family, the Gremlins who live in the heat pump, and to John the Superstar, the demon of the dry well.

    No orbs were harmed during the writing of this book. Although one or two were smirked at.

    Introduction

    Do I believe in ghosts? No, but I am afraid of them.

    —Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand (1697–1780)

    According to the traditions of the Caddo people, a nation that spanned much of modern Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and parts of Texas from around 900 CE, there never used to be such a thing as death. Once born, everyone and everything just kept on living. Which means things got mighty crowded, mighty quickly.

    Soon, so many people swarmed the earth that there simply was no room for any more, but of course they kept on being born. Finally, the chiefs held a council, to try to decide what they should do.

    One man suggested introducing death, and the assembly discussed that for a while. But their deliberations always came back around to one insurmountable obstacle. Death was so permanent, and nobody could bear the thought of a life being extinguished forever.

    Nobody, that is, except for the Coyote. He believed that death should be final. Otherwise, he asked the council, what could they possibly be trying to achieve? The food would still run out in the end. Living space would still become cramped and unbearable. The world simply wasn’t big enough for everybody to live, not even if they did it in shifts.

    His arguments fell on deaf ears. Death could not be final. Nobody, the other chiefs all agreed, would be able to bear the sorrow of knowing that they would never see their friends, relatives, loved ones again. The world might become less populated, but it would also be full of broken hearts and misery.

    No, it was decreed. People would die, and they would remain dead for a while. But then they would come back, to be replaced in death by other people.

    As soon as this final decision had been arrived at, the medicine men set to work. First, they built an enormous house of grass, with its entranceway facing toward the east. Then, they took a large black-and-white eagle feather and affixed it to the top of the house.

    Every time somebody died, the feather would turn bloody, and then fall over. That would be the sign for all the medicine men to gather, and together they would call the deceased to the grass house, his spirit borne aboard a whirlwind that blew in from the west, circled the house, and entered it from the east.

    The spirit would be restored to the form that he or she bore during life, and then its owner would be returned to the land of the living. The entire process, from death to rebirth, would take around ten days.

    Coyote, however, remained uneasy; remained confident that people were simply postponing the inevitable. One day, and one day soon, the world would become so full that all the whirlwinds in the universe would not be able to carry the crushed and the starved and the suffocated. That the undead would pile up, while the living grew more cramped, until everything fell into chaos.

    There was just one thing to do. The first time the feather fell, Coyote simply observed. But the second time, he acted. He watched quietly as the medicine men gathered at the grass house; remained silent as they began to sing and chant, and call the spirit to them. Then Coyote selected for himself the seat that was placed closest to the entrance to the grass house; and, as soon as he heard the whirlwind approaching, he reached out one hand, pushed the door shut and then locked it.

    Outside, the whirlwind raged, and the spirit howled, but neither could open the door. Finally the storm passed, and the spirit whirled on by, never to be reborn. Death had arrived on Earth and so, in the form of all of its victims, forever locked out of the grass house, had ghosts. Because the door to life, once closed, can never be reopened.

    So, do you believe in ghosts? Spirits? Visitors from the afterlife? Trespassers from beyond the veil?

    Wait.

    No.

    Don’t answer that. There are only three possible responses to that question anyway, and not one of them is really appropriate here. If you say yes, then—as Charles Dickens mused of Jacob Marley’s spectral comeback in A Christmas Carol, nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate, because you already know what to expect.

    Boo!

    If you say no, then you’re probably not even reading this. And if you say I don’t know, then nothing you will read, here or anyplace else, is likely to sway you one way or the other. You need to meet a ghost, see a ghost, be haunted by a ghost . . . and even then, you may still not be convinced. For Dickens considered that as well, when he set old Ebenezer Scrooge to contemplate the wraith that sat before him:

    You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are.

    Poor Marley’s ghost! Seven years he waited to return to Earth, to speak again with his old friend and partner, and what does he get? Mistaken for a crumb of cheese, that’s what.

    What a wonderful sentence Dickens concocted, though, and what a wonderful concept he hatched. How much of what we see, hear, interpret and understand in the course of our own daily lives is simply the by-product of something we ate, something we drank, something we smoked? More than we are willing to admit, that’s for certain, and that’s when we’re wide awake and stone-cold sober. Who knows what phantoms of the mind, what blots of mustard or crumbs of cheese, which artificial sweeteners or cholesterol remedies, are playing havoc with our senses while we sleep?

    There’s more aspartame than apparition about you, my friend. More Prozac than poltergeist.

    So, is that really what we think? That ghosts (and, in their wake, spirits, specters, wraiths, haunts and all their other fiends, friends and relatives) are simply figments of the imagination?

    It shouldn’t really be that difficult a question to answer, although the fact that there’s no scientific proof that ghosts do actually exist is always going to sway a lot of people’s opinion. Which is odd because—if we are going to be truly pedantic about it—there’s no scientific proof for the existence of a lot of the things that people believe in, including the big bang, evolution, relativity and great swaths of mathematics. Oh, and God. In one way or another, they’re all theories, notions and best-guess scenarios, and that’s all they can be, because there’s no scientific proof for their nonexistence, either.

    We believe in them because a friend of a friend . . . who happens to be an astrologer, a biologist, a scientist or a priest . . . tells us to believe, and that trust is a good thing.

    Imagine how dull camping trips would become if we knew for an incontrovertible fact that nobody has ever been trapped in their car while a recently escaped homicidal madman beats a slow rhythm on the roof with the decapitated head of the buddy who went to get gas twenty minutes back.

    Or how awkward family gatherings would become, as you tried to explain to Great-Aunt Chimpanzee why you’ve ignored her birthday for the past forty years.

    And how much harder it would be to fall asleep at nights, if you knew what all the creaks, groans and rumbles of the old house settling down really were.

    Excuse me, but is that a gateway to Hell in your basement? Or do you just really need to get the boiler serviced?

    The ghosts who fill these pages . . . who flit, float and drift through them, too . . . already know the answer to the question. And that really should be all the evidence that you require. It doesn’t matter whether ghosts exist according to the rules by which you live your life. Ghosts exist according to the rules by which other people live their lives; and, apparently, according to the rules by which the dead don’t live theirs.

    There are firm legal grounds for believing in ghosts. The law of the land does recognize the possibility that a house can be haunted. In 1991, Reuters straightfacedly reported on the ruling handed down by a New York state court, the Appellate Division of the state Supreme Court, stating that a house seller must inform all potential purchasers if the house is haunted, or face the prospect of having to return the deposit. The ruling also declared that, for legal purposes, the house in dispute was haunted.

    The ghost story itself is lovely, a classic Victorian home in Nyack, New York, gently haunted by what the Reuters report termed kindly ghosts from the Revolutionary War. Wall Street bond trader Jeffrey Stambovsky had already placed a $33,000 deposit on the $650,000 house when he decided he didn’t want to own a haunted house, and asked for his money back. The owner, Helen Ackley, refused, saying in effect: ‘Let the buyer beware.’ But the court said there was no way Stambovsky could have known about the ghosts unless Ackley told him, and ordered he be refunded his deposit.

    Neither are the courts alone in acknowledging the spirit world. Three years later, in 1994, Professor Ian Stevenson, a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, aroused considerable media interest when he declared that ghost sightings should no longer be dismissed as either hoaxes or hallucinations. Evidence for these kinds of experiences are too frequent to be dismissed, he announced at the conclusion of a lengthy study into sightings.

    In other words, not everybody could be mistaken.

    More people have seen ghosts than have seen a dinosaur.

    More people have seen ghosts than have walked on the moon.

    More people have seen ghosts than have Internet access.

    Yet imagine how silly you’d think somebody was if they told you they didn’t believe in one of those things. And again, it really doesn’t matter what we, the living, think. Do ghosts themselves believe in ghosts?

    It would appear, by sheer weight of numbers, that they do. In which case, to paraphrase the French philosopher René Descartes, I haunt, therefore I am, and it is a cause of considerable regret that no record exists of Descartes himself having returned to earth as a restless spirit. What could, after all, have been a more fitting fate for the man whose philosophies not only fostered the dawning of the Enlightenment, with its sniffy dismissal of the occult in everyday life, but who also birthed the expression the ghost in the machine?

    When a ghost hunting expedition stumbles across more than it expected. . . well, you know it won’t end well. They wouldn’t have made a movie, Documenting the Grey Man (2011) about it, if it had.

    Reserve Productions/Photofest

    There are ghosts in the machine aplenty here, and occasionally ghosts that are machines. It is a fallacy, after all, to believe that only a living, thinking creature can come back and haunt the living. As ridiculous as it is to believe that only humans have souls. You will discover spectral dogs and ghostly cats in these pages, hauntings by horse and even hamster. Trains, boats and planes, too, all have their tales that must be told, and long disassembled buildings are as likely to reappear where they once stood, as their inhabitants are to return wearing the clothes that they weren’t buried in.

    Ghosts are disembodied spirits. Probably. But which unproven science is it that insists that people and possibly animals alone are possessed of such things? We have (or we should have) all experienced the sensation that this building is a happy one, but this one is sad. That this house is peaceful, but that one is disturbed. Where did that happiness or sadness, peace or disturbance come from? And, should the building be destroyed or demolished, where does it go?

    The obvious answer is, it doesn’t go anywhere. It stays where it always was. It may fade over time, but just as living beings have a spirit, so inanimate objects have a presence. And that presence, some people will tell you, can stick around for years.

    In January 1900, writing on Native American beliefs in the publication American Anthropologist, author J. W. Powell declared, war-clubs have ghosts. The power of the club is the ghost of the club. Spears have ghosts and the ghosts of spears have eyes. The warrior who throws the spear must control its ghost. The ghost of the spear must have unerring aim, or the aim of the thrower is in vain. Arrows have ghosts, and arrows will not hit their mark unless their ghosts are controlled. Bows also have ghosts and bows will fail unless their ghosts are nerved to the task.

    Which, if you think about it, makes sense. Or maybe it makes more sense if you don’t think about it. A funny thing. The more conscious of its science and reason that mankind becomes, the less it understands of the things that it really should be conscious of.

    Early human society would have looked with incredulity upon the question with which we opened this introduction. Do you believe in ghosts? You might as well ask a modern man, Do you believe in sausages? Do you believe in furniture?

    The spirit world and the human world were once so closely interwoven as to be indivisible. Look at the monuments that our ancient predecessors erected, and the traditions they devised, to house, honor and succor their dead. Stonehenge, the pyramids, the catacombs of Rome, the necropolis of Hierapolis. Modern cemeteries themselves are an echo of these ancient beliefs, and the cost of a modern funeral likewise.

    If we truly believed that the dead are dead (and overlooking, for the sake of argument, any health and hygiene aspects of the affair), we’d throw them out with potato peelings. Instead, deep down inside, we still retain enough of our ancestors’ belief that our dead are aware of how we treat them, that we try to ensure they don’t have anything to complain about.

    And we listen with widening eyes and quickening heartbeat to the stories told about internments that were not carried out to the satisfaction of their headline act.

    Sometime around the mid-1920s, a wealthy New York socialite left instructions that she should be buried in one particular, very beautiful and very, very expensive dress. Her sister-in-law, however, had her own designs on the outfit and, sometime before the corpse was dressed, she substituted the desired dress for a similar one, one that was almost as beautiful and almost as expensive. But not quite.

    She held out against the rage and fury of the deceased for eight days . . . or, more precisely, seven nights . . . before she confessed her deception to the widower, and arrangements were made for the corpse to be exhumed and redressed according to its original wishes.

    Throughout the intervening week, however, the wretched woman barely slept, for all the noise that her late sister-in-law was making . . . noise, incidentally, that nobody else in the house could hear. She barely ate, for all the food that was placed before her seemed to heave and writhe with maggots. Maggots that nobody else could see. And she knew no peace, either, for several choice pieces of jewelry were missing from her dresser, a different one disappearing every day, until she was certain that the house was wide open to intruders.

    And so it was, because when the grave was dug up and the coffin reopened, what sparkled in the corpse’s ears, on her fingers, and at her throat? The missing jewelry. All of which was returned the following night, after the dress had been restored to its rightful owner.

    Humbug! Even with the best will in the world, and a sense of credulity the size of Connecticut, that story is filled with so many holes that it simply cannot be true. There are no names. There is nothing but the vaguest date and, likewise, a vague location. No heed is given to how long it would have taken to get the necessary permissions to exhume a corpse; nor to the fact that few authorities would permit such an act simply to change the dead woman’s clothes. Any experienced ghost hunter will tell you, the whole story is itself a phantom.

    But it falls within a noble line of descent. The Roman satirist Lucian of Samosata (125–circa 180 CE) tells, in his Philopseudus, of a similar state of affairs, set in motion following the death of a much beloved wife. Her husband gave her the most splendid funeral and, in keeping with tradition, had consigned everything she owned to the same great pyre that consumed her body.

    Twenty days later, however, as he sat quietly reading with his son, his wife suddenly appeared, to thank him for the funeral, but to point out that he had been a little careless in his preparations for it. One of her shoes, a golden slipper, had escaped the funeral pyre. It had fallen behind a chest and been overlooked, even as its twin was thrown into the flames. And sure enough, when the man pulled the chest out from the wall and looked, there lay the golden slipper. It was burned the following day and he never saw his wife’s ghost again.

    Lucian is not the most reliable guide, of course. He had a wicked sense of humor and a fine appreciation of the absurd. Perhaps this story, too, was invented. So we turn to a documented tale, exhumed from the pages of the nineteenth-century American press by the doyen of modern spectral archaeologists, Chris Woodyard. Her Ghosts from the Past series of books is littered with stories that might not convince the modern skeptic, but were good enough for the editors of bygone local newspapers. Such as this little item, retrieved from the pages of the New Haven Register of February 18, 1886.

    Yesterday morning four women, respectable in appearance and advanced in years, entered the side gate of the Roman Catholic cemetery, proceeded along one of the avenues and halted at a new made grave. Presently two men made their appearance and with shovels opened the grave. The women stood with bated breath, tears running down their faces. Presently the box which enclosed the casket and remains of a young girl was reached. One of the women gave a low scream. The strong arms of the men raised the box and placed it above ground. The lid was taken off the box and the casket opened. The features of a young, handsome, and beloved daughter of one of the women was exposed to view. The men looked on as if in wonder at what followed. None but the women understood it. Busy fingers went through the dead girl’s hair and shroud and all the pins that could be found were removed. The string which has placed around the feet after death was removed. A needle and thread were brought into use to supply the place of the pins in the hair and shroud. The lid was then placed on the casket and the remains lowered into the grave, which was filled once more.

    This strange proceeding gave rise to many inquiries. Only a few could answer them. It was learned that there is a strong superstition among the Irish people that if a corpse is buried tied or with pins or with even a knot at the end of a thread that sews the shroud the soul will be confined to the grave for all eternity, and that the persons guilty of the blunder will be disturbed by the restrained spirits while on earth. Thus it was, according to the testimony of the one of the women, who said she had been bothered for two nights previous by the ghost of the girl, now all were happy. This is not the first time that an incident of the kind has occurred in the same cemetery.

    Or, from the same source, this tale retrieved from the archives of the St. Albans [VT] Daily Messenger of October 12, 1876, an old maid in a West Baltimore boarding house, who left instructions that she should be buried not . . . in any costly dress, but in a plain shroud, and threatened to haunt the house if her direction was not heeded.

    Of course it wasn’t. Believing her last wish to simply be an old lady’s modesty, her friends instead had her interred in an elegant silk and adorned the casket with beautiful flowers.

    Two weeks later, the boarding house was bereft of guests, all of them driven away by the old woman whose spirit simply walked the house at night, [paying] visits to every sleeping room in the house. The landlady is talking of having the body exhumed, the silk dress taken off, and the plain shroud put on.

    More recent tales of a similar fiber abound, reminders one and all that, for all of our scientific and philosophical advances, we’re really not that far divorced from the fears of our most distant forefathers. Indeed, given the terror that stories such as these are intended to arouse in the reader, who is to say that mankind did not become more, rather than less superstitious, once it stopped believing the evidence of its own senses, and started listening instead to the lies of its priests and scientists?

    Author and philosopher Thomas Ligotti once said that consciousness was an evolutionary accident, a fluke that gave man, alone of all living creatures, one piece of bitter knowledge. The fact that the universe is endless, immeasurable, and utterly indifferent, while man is the absolute opposite in every respect. Other philosophers have said much the same thing.

    Yet, if we accept the existence of ghosts, such lofty pronouncements are balled up and thrown away, for we too become endless and immeasurable. Only indifferent remains debatable, because within the multiple schools of thought that attempt to discern what a haunting means, we again have multiple options.

    It could be that hauntings are conscious, and that they are fired by as many different emotions and motives as there are emotions and motives in the first place. Regret, joy, exasperation, loss, spite . . . that brilliant early 2000s TV series Dead Like Me even suggested that hauntings are motivated by envy, and that is certainly something to consider. The legendary Enfield Poltergeist, on the other hand, when asked why it tormented people so, simply admitted, I like annoying you.

    It could be that hauntings are unconscious, and that ghosts thrive on a plain of existence that is utterly separate from ours, while taking place in the same location. Meaning their actions—the haunting itself—occur regardless of whether we (meaning humans) are there to see them. The 2001 movie The Others, directed by Alejandro Amenábar and starring Nicole Kidman, investigated that scenario to excellent ends.

    It could be that hauntings are neither of these things; that they are simply recordings of past events that are caused to play by the convergence of certain conditions, be they emotional, meteorological, or whatever else. Author Nigel Kneale conjured this scenario in The Stone Tape, an early 1970s British television play that has been ranked among the most terrifying fictions of the modern age.

    Or perhaps they are all of these things.

    Other theories abound, of course. One of the most remarkable ghost stories ever written was the work not of a novelist, but of a physician, the Scotsman Robert MacNish (1802–1837). He once administered to a female patient who haunted herself, beckoning from other rooms, going about her business all around the house, behaving in every way like a traditional ghost, but visible only to her own self.

    Sometimes it’s not a case of people seeing ghosts. Sometimes, ghosts see people . . . as Nicole Kidman discovered in 2001’s The Others.

    Dimension Films/Photofest

    MacNish delved deeper into the woman’s life, learning that she was trapped within a marriage of the most mind-numbing boredom, and that her entire existence had become that of a humdrum drone. Yet she was an intelligent woman. So what did her mind do? It created a mirror image of itself, and sent it out to lead a more fulfilling existence.

    Close to two centuries later, written up in the November 2014 edition of Current Biology, scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology claimed to have identified those parts of the brain that are responsible for generating what we might call the presence of a ghost, the sensation that there is someone standing close by, or watching, even though we know we’re alone at the time.

    According to Dr. Giulio Rognini, one of the researchers involve in the experiment, Our brain possesses several representations of our body in space. Under normal conditions, it is able to assemble a unified self-perception of the self from these representations. But when the system malfunctions . . . this can sometimes create a second representation of one’s own body, which is no longer perceived as ‘me’ but as someone else, a ‘presence.’

    But of course that explanation, that a ghost is some form of manifestation conjured from within one’s own self, works only up to a point. Unless, that is, one’s mind also happens to move down some very disturbing corridors indeed, and habitually views itself as a headless Hessian, a drowned pirate, a blind bluesman, a Civil War surgeon. To name just four of the manifestations whom we will be shortly encountering.

    Neither does it address the reactions that animals . . . pet dogs and cats, but wild beasts too . . . are documented to exhibit when there’s a ghost on the loose. Nor the evidence, if we might call it that, produced by the vast array of instruments and machines that man, in his infinite curiosity (and, perhaps, gullibility), has employed over the years to capture tangible proof of a ghost’s existence.

    Recorded sounds, inexplicable photographs, temperature changes. EMF Meters, Full Spectrum Cams, EVP Recorders, TriField Meters, Laser Grids, Infrared / Nightvision IR Lights, Thermal Cameras, Interactive Cuddly Toys. . . . Seriously. Google Boo Buddy and discover how BooBuddy . . . investigates the paranormal with you . . . BooBuddy loves asking EVP questions in order to promote a response. If the environment changes . . . BooBuddy responds appropriately, to let you know that there may be a presence. Just sit BooBuddy down and turn it on to get to work. BooBuddy will do the rest starting with baseline readings. For best results and documentation set a recorder or cam by the bear to document any responses. BooBuddy just loves being on camera!

    Sometimes, of course, there is a logical explanation for what might otherwise seem a supernatural occurrence. Discussing, in song, the possible return of the murdered milkman Ernie, comedian Benny Hill asked, Was that the trees a-rustling? Or the hinges of the gate? Or Ernie’s ghostly [milk bottles] a-rattling in their crate? It is a chilling piece of imagery—although you will notice that, if you reverse the two lines, it becomes far less foreboding. Was it the ghostly bottles? Or just the wind? And this raises what is possibly the most common explanation of them all, for every haunting that ever was. The possibility that it’s all in your mind and, if there are multiple witnesses, it’s Mass Hysteria.

    Assuming, of course, you believe in that. Some people don’t.

    Some ghosts are very easily snuffed out.

    As a thirteen-year-old, unsettled in a house that was reliably reported to be haunted by my stepmother’s first husband, I spent many a night lying in bed, in the room where the dead man’s corpse had been laid out, listening to footsteps that advanced, slowly and heavily, along the hallway outside my room, before halting at my own bedroom door.

    As if wondering what to do next.

    The door never opened, the handle was never turned. Nothing happened and, in some ways, that was worse. At least if the door was flung wide open, and a howling specter burst into the room, I could poop myself, scream, and get it over with.

    Instead, I waited. Night after night after long, sleepless night. One time, desperate to calm my thoughts, I switched on the radio—only for Bobby Boris Pickett and the Crypt Kickers’ Monster Mash to come crackling over the airwaves.

    Maybe that was the night, exhausted by suspense, fed up with fear, and driven to feats of superhuman daring by the effects of sleeplessness, that I finally opened the door to my nocturnal near-visitor. Stood in the open doorway as the fiendish footsteps approached, gazed unblinkingly out into the hallway as they drew closer and closer . . .

    . . . and then the denouement. The debunking. The faint, but unmistakable sound of our row-home neighbors using the bathroom they had installed on the other side of my bedroom wall.

    I laid the ghost to rest the following morning at breakfast, and my stepbrother never forgave me. Neither, in a way, did I. Whether it scares the pants off you or not, there is a certain pleasure to be drawn from living in what is believed to be a haunted house. Far more than can be derived from living in one that simply isn’t very well insulated.

    Imagination is a powerful deceiver. It takes its cues not only from what it perceives at the time, but also from a lifetime of prior experiences, assumptions and beliefs, actual and otherwise.

    A reader with a healthy appetite for the masterful fictions of the author M. R. James will regard a howling wind and a tapping on the window in a very different light to one whose literary tastes do not extend beyond an annotated set of baseball statistics. It’s like the nineteenth-century professor and author Charles Ham once said—Those who believe in ghosts always see them. Or, as George Bernard Shaw told Henry James, No man who doesn’t believe in a ghost ever sees one.

    Neither declaration is actually true. The literature of the supernatural abounds with supposed true-life experiences that begin I never believed in ghosts until . . . But the notion that belief becomes easier the more fervently one believes in something is one that few people should feel too comfortable arguing with.

    For every soul who believes in ghosts (or doesn’t, but has somehow been talked around), of course, there is, and always has been, another who pooh-poohs the very notion. Earlier mentions of the pyramids and Stonehenge testify to the beliefs of the ancients, but there is a considerable body of work that testifies equally resolutely to their disbeliefs—as Lucian of Samosata, again, reminds us with the tale of Democritus of Abdera.

    Here was a man who was so opposed to the existence of ghosts that he actually took up residence in a tomb at a cemetery. Nor could his disbelief be shaken, not even by local youths who enjoyed painting their bodies and donning frightful masks, and haunting his home for kicks. Old Democritus just told them to go away . . . and to take their black paint, and black sheets with them. A sentiment, if we might digress for a moment, that certainly gives modern spookophiles something to think about.

    Unlike modern ghosts, Roman spirits did not caper about in white. Indeed, ghosts in general do not seem to have adopted white sheets until as late as the seventeenth century—at around the same time as the English Parliament passed the series of laws known as the Burial in Woollen Acts of 1666, 1678 and 1680, requiring that the dead be buried either in woolen shrouds of pure English manufacture, or naked in the case of the poor. The majority of these shrouds were, of course, white.

    Still we can learn much from Democritus, including the fact that he was content to dismiss his visitors as simply high-spirited youths. A far cry from the citizens of the English city of Portsmouth, in August 2014, who summoned the law to deal with a miscreant hanging out at a churchyard, throwing [his] arms in the air and saying ‘woooooo.’ The penalty for imitating a ghost in modern times? A $58 fine, plus $67 more in costs and other expenses.

    But we might also say that both Democritus and the victims of the Portsmouth spook were lucky. Their tormentors were as human as they were. A far less agreeable fate awaited the protagonist of what is probably the best-known of all latter-day stories about similarly situated unbelievers, M. R. James’s There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard.

    Here, too, a graveside home is inhabited by a miserly gent who professes to neither care, nor believe, that his neighbors could ever be anything more than silent rotting clay. And so, having witnessed one particular burial, and in particular heard the telltale chinking of coin being thrown into the grave alongside its occupant, our miser waited until dark, when he was certain that the coast was clear, and then set out to retrieve the treasure.

    Which he did, very successfully.

    Back in his rooms a few nights later, he was disturbed first by sounds and then by shadows.

    James, the master, completes the picture:

    Between him and the moonlight was the black outline of the curious bunched head . . . Then there was a figure in the room. Dry earth rattled on the floor. A low cracked voice said Where is it? and steps went hither and thither, faltering steps as of one walking with difficulty.

    It could be seen now and again, peering into corners, stooping to look under chairs; finally it could be heard fumbling at the doors of the cupboard in the wall, throwing them open.

    There was a scratching of long nails on the empty shelves.

    The figure whipped round, stood for an instant at the side of the bed, raised its arms and, with a hoarse scream of YOU’VE GOT IT. . . .

    Read it aloud to a campsite filled with impressionable youth. Even when you know the punch line, There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard is one of the most effective ghost stories ever written—meaning it’s one of the most frightening; and in many ways that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?

    We do not seek the truth about whether or not

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