“When I was between the ages of five and eight, my sister and I slept in a large attic bedroom. At nightfall the room was filled with gypsies who glided around in clusters. They wore colorful thin flowing dresses and rummaged greedily through my drawers and books as if they would steal everything. I lay in bed as stiff as a board, trying to will myself invisible, praying they would not notice me looking . . . Daylight obliterated the gypsies, rendering them as thoroughly insubstantial as they had been real in the dark. I had a vague understanding that my vision was private, so I never told my family what I saw.” So began Corinne May Botz’s fascination with the invisible, a phenomenon that has profoundly influenced her approach to photography in style and subject matter. For more than ten years, she searched for ghost stories in buildings across the United States. She ventured into these haunted places with both camera and tape recorder in hand; her photographs, accompanied by first-person narratives, reveal a rare glimpse into American interiors, both physical and psychological. This book includes more than eighty haunted buildings, from the legendary to the ordinary, including Edgar Allan Poe’s house in Baltimore, a New Jersey tavern, and a Massachusetts farmhouse, a log cabin in Kentucky, and a number of private residences. The text includes ghost stories told to the author by those who lived through the moving rugs, creaking floors, apparitions, disappearing—and reappearing—objects, cries in the night, mysteriously burning candles, and other unexplained occurrences.

Winner of a 2021 South Central Modern Language Association Book Prize At the heart of America’s slave system was the legal definition of people as property. While property ownership is a cornerstone of the American dream, the status of enslaved people supplies a contrasting American nightmare. Sarah Gilbreath Ford considers how writers in works from nineteenth-century slave narratives to twenty-first-century poetry employ gothic tools, such as ghosts and haunted houses, to portray the horrors of this nightmare. Haunted Property: Slavery and the Gothic thus reimagines the southern gothic, which has too often been simply equated with the macabre or grotesque and then dismissed as regional. Although literary critics have argued that the American gothic is driven by the nation’s history of racial injustice, what is missing in this critical conversation is the key role of property. Ford argues that out of all of slavery’s perils, the definition of people as property is the central impetus for haunting because it allows the perpetration of all other terrors. Property becomes the engine for the white accumulation of wealth and power fueled by the destruction of black personhood. Specters often linger, however, to claim title, and Ford argues that haunting can be a bid for property ownership. Through examining works by Harriet Jacobs, Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Sherley Anne Williams, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Natasha Trethewey, Ford reveals how writers can use the gothic to combat legal possession with spectral possession.

Expanded and with great new stories, this is the biggest and best anthology of ghostly hauntings ever. Over 40 tales of visitation by the undead - from vengeful and violent spirits, set on causing harm to innocent people tucked up in their homes, to rarer and more kindly ghosts, returning from the grave to reach out across the other side. Yet others entertain desires of a more sinister bent, including the erotic. This new edition includes a selection of favourite haunted house tales chosen by famous screen stars Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Plus a top ranking list of contributors that includes Stephen King, Bram Stoker, Ruth Rendell, and James Herbert - all brought together by an anthologist who himself lives in a haunted house. Stories include: Something unspeakable lurks in a Connecticut apartment closet, in Stephen King's 'The Boogeyman'; An Irish castle holds something truly horrifying in wait, in 'The Whistling Room' by William Hope Hodgson; The lecherous old ghost of a Georgian country house eyes up his latest tenant, in Norah Lofts' 'Mr Edward'; An ancient mansion on a shelf of rock previously occupied by a doomed castle, in 'In Letters of Fire' by Gaston Le Roux; The hunter is hunted in James Herbert's tale of nineteenth-century country mansion, 'The Ghost Hunter'; Psychic phenomena and poltergeists, avenging spirits and phantom lovers - curl up and read on, but never imagine you are safe from a visit...

This edition of House of Spirits and Whispers features a new preface from the author, photographs, and bonus material We had been instructed to enter by the back door. That's the part of the house where the old man had lived. It was where he still lived. Turns out he was watching us that day, too, silent and heavy as the air, bound to the earth and his former home.We had been instructed to enter by the back door. In 1994, Annie Wilder and her children moved into a 100-year-old house in a historic Mississippi River town. Beautiful but spooky, the house had been on the market for six months with no offers. It felt like-and proved to be-a very haunted house. Essentially the story of a remarkable old Victorian house that seems to be a threshold to the spirit world and the astral realm, House of Spirits and Whispers has a backstory of the Wilder family's relationship with the ghost of the home's previous owner, an old man named Leon. Covering a decade's worth of ghostly activity and supernatural encounters, from whispering radiators to visits and appearances from all manner of spirits and entities, this unusual story is the true account of Annie Wilder's experiences living in a haunted house.

It's Halloween, and you are the special guest at a haunted house celebration party--provided you pass the test that the silly ghosts, skeletons, witches and spiders have in store! This Not-Too-Spooky Pop-Up Book springs to life in six whimsical spreads with movable scenes, interactive elements, and a new surprise on every page.

Falling leaves, chill winds, shorter days . . . and spooky houses. Halloween in Maine transports part-time reporter Lucy Stone into cozy heaven. Until someone goes missing . . . A woman with many hats, Lucy Stone is rarely on time, but she’s never too late to catch the important news in the Maine coastal town of Tinker’s Cove. Sometimes it might even make the front page of the Pennysaver, the town’s weekly paper. For example, the latest out of the basement town hall meeting is that the dilapidated house across the street from the elementary school will not be condemned. In fact, a local inspection has proved it’s structurally sound. Even more surprising, newcomers to Tinker’s Cove are about to close on their soon-to-be new home. Despite rumors that the house is a haven for ghosts, Ty and Heather Moon soon take residence. But strangely, they’re not exactly receptive to the town’s welcoming committee. Odder still are the noises and flickering lights erupting from the house at all hours. And when a local boy goes missing near the house, it’s up to Lucy Stone to unravel the mystery of the eccentric couple and their increasingly frightful behavior.

In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of "ghost tours," frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. "Dark tourism" often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they continue to feed problematic "Old South" narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work, Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are still with us.