From bone fetishism in the ancient world to painted skulls in Austria and Bavaria: an unusual and compelling work of cultural history. It is sometimes said that death is the last taboo, but it was not always so. For centuries, religious establishments constructed decorated ossuaries and charnel houses that stand as masterpieces of art created from human bone. These unique structures have been pushed into the footnotes of history; they were part of a dialogue with death that is now silent. The sites in this specially photographed and brilliantly original study range from the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Palermo, where the living would visit mummified or skeletal remains and lovingly dress them; to the Paris catacombs; to fantastic bone-encrusted creations in Austria, Cambodia, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Italy, Peru, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, and elsewhere. Paul Koudounaris photographed more than seventy sites for this book. He analyzes the role of these remarkable memorials within the cultures that created them, as well as the mythology and folklore that developed around them, and skillfully traces a remarkable human endeavor.

Mr. and Mrs. Jackson had been searching for their dream home for many years with little luck. Mr. Jackson thought that if they were to look in the countryside area instead of the city they could get more land and house for their buck. Mr. Jackson was a handyman, so if the house needed repairs he knew how to fix it up back to its original beauty. He asked his wife to come along with him to look at some houses in the country after he got off from work today. Of course, Mrs. Jackson said yes. Mr. Jackson arrived home around 3 p.m. Mrs. Jackson was waiting for her husband in the living room watching her favorite soap opera. Mr. Jackson entered the front door of his house, and called out to his wife saying, "Betty, are you ready to go house hunting?" "Yes, Mike, I'm ready to go," said his beautiful wife Betty. Mike and Betty got into the car and drove out to the country in search of their dream home. Mike and Betty were having a good time driving in the country and seeing the beautiful green pastures, cattle, and beautiful mansions. The weather was warm and sunny with a slight breeze, just a little over seventy degrees. The Jacksons couldn't have picked a more perfect day to search for their dream home. "Slow down honey, I think this may be the one," said Betty. Mike pulled into the front gate of the mansion. Put the car in park, got out of the car opened the gate, got back in the car, and drove to the front of the mansion. Mike put the car in park shut off the engine and said, "Darling, if the outside of the mansion looks as good as the inside we'll do everything in our power to get this home," said Mike. "Mike, I'm so excited I almost lost my breath when my eyes gazed upon this beautiful mansion," replied Betty. Mike got out of the car went over and opened Betty's door and went to the front door to see if anyone was home. Just as Mike knocked on the door, there was an envelope next to his foot. Mike picked up the envelope, opened it, and read it aloud to his wife Betty. "The letter says, the owner is out of the country and if you are inquiring about purchasing the mansion call this number and the realtor will be happy to show you the mansion," said Mike. "Call the realtor, Mike, maybe he can still come by. It’s only four o'clock," said Betty. Mike gave the realtor a call. The realtor said he was only fifteen minutes away and would be happy to show the Jacksons the home. "Mike darling, I'm so glad you got a hold of the realtor," said Betty. "Well since it's going to take the realtor about fifteen minutes to get here why don't we look at the backyard and the rest of the property," said Mike. "That's fine with me," said Betty. Betty and Mike took a stroll around the property and liked what they saw. Betty gave her husband a kiss on the cheek and said," I'm glad you decided to find a home in the country instead of the city. I hope we get this place. I feel like we belong here," said Betty. Betty and Mike were unaware of the evil inside the mansion that was waiting to devour them both.

“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.

It's rural England, just after the turn of the last century. Charlotte married Edward Shift after the sudden death of her first husband, Horace Torrington. They live at Sterne, the home they are in danger of losing due to a financial crisis, with Charlotte's 3 children: Emerald, Clovis and Smudge. On the day of Emerald's birthday party, a terrible train wreck occurs on a branch line and the stranded passengers seek refuge at Sterne. Among these passengers is Charlie Traversham-Beechers, a sketchy figure from Charlotte's past. This unusual guest list makes for an unforgettable birthday celebration for Emerald and an evening of the past literally coming back to haunt Charlotte.

There are places in the United States of America where violent acts of bloodshed have occurred. Years may pass—even centuries—but the mark of death remains. They are known as Murder Houses. From a colonial manse in New England to a small-town home in Iowa to a Beverly Hills mansion, these residences have taken on a life of their own, gaining everything from local lore and gossip to national—and even global—infamy. Writer Steve Lehto recounts the stories behind the houses where Lizzie Borden supposedly gave her stepmother “forty whacks,” where the real Amityville Horror was first unleashed by gunfire, and where the demented acts of the Manson Family horrified a nation—as well some lesser-known sites of murder that were no less ghastly. Exploring the past and present of more than twenty-five renowned homicide scenes, American Murder Houses is a tour through the real estate of some of the most grisly and fascinating crimes in American history. INCLUDES PHOTOGRAPHS

In the 1820s, two families, unknown to each other, worked on farms in the American wilderness. It seemed unlikely that the families would ever meet—and yet, they did. The son of one family, the famed actor John Wilkes Booth, killed the son of the other, President Abraham Lincoln, in the most significant assassination in American history. The murder, however, did not come without warning—in fact, it had been foretold. In the Houses of Their Dead is the first book of the many thousands written about Lincoln to focus on the president’s fascination with Spiritualism, and to demonstrate how it linked him, uncannily, to the man who would kill him. Abraham Lincoln is usually seen as a rational, empirically-minded man, yet as acclaimed scholar and biographer Terry Alford reveals, he was also deeply superstitious and drawn to the irrational. Like millions of other Americans, including the Booths, Lincoln and his wife, Mary, suffered repeated personal tragedies, and turned for solace to Spiritualism, a new practice sweeping the nation that held that the dead were nearby and could be contacted by the living. Remarkably, the Lincolns and the Booths even used the same mediums, including Charles Colchester, a specialist in “blood writing” whom Mary first brought to her husband, and who warned the president after listening to the ravings of another of his clients, John Wilkes Booth. Alford’s expansive, richly-textured chronicle follows the two families across the nineteenth century, uncovering new facts and stories about Abraham and Mary while drawing indelible portraits of the Booths—from patriarch Julius, a famous actor in his own right, to brother Edwin, the most talented member of the family and a man who feared peacock feathers, to their confidant Adam Badeau, who would become, strangely, the ghostwriter for President Ulysses S. Grant. At every turn, Alford shows that despite the progress of the age—the glass hypodermic syringe, electromagnetic induction, and much more—death remained ever-present, and thus it was only rational for millions of Americans, from the president on down, to cling to beliefs that seem anything but. A novelistic narrative of two exceptional American families set against the convulsions their times, In the Houses of Their Dead ultimately leads us to consider how ghost stories helped shape the nation.