In Search Of Ghosts

Using his expertise as a famous ghost hunter, the author recreates the eerie scenes of astonishing and controversial cases that have not been solved.

From exploring the Tower of London to investigating a haunted Colorado firehouse, paranormal researcher Richard Estep takes you behind the scenes for an up-close-and-personal encounter with a fascinating legion of hauntings. This collection reveals some of the most chilling, captivating, and weird cases that Richard has investigated over the past twenty years, in England and in the United States. In Search of the Paranormal is filled with rich historical detail, present-day research, and compelling eyewitness accounts. You are there with the team at each haunted location: walking through a desecrated graveyard, shivering in a dark basement, getting thrown into The Clink, watching a "ghost-lit" stage in an old theater. Employing a variety of investigative methods—from high-tech gadgets to old-fashioned practices such as dowsing, table tipping, and Ouija boards—Richard Estep and his team uncover the dark mysteries of the paranormal realm. Praise: "This book is written from the heart. Believe in the paranormal or not, Richard Estep's words ring out with sincerity and integrity."—Patrick Burns, star of Haunting Evidence "Within these pages, you can join Richard on his ghostly adventures, from the UK to the US and experience with him what it's like to be a Paranormal Investigator."—Paul Bradford, star of Ghost Hunters International

Explore haunted places of Montgomery County, Maryland, and its surrounding area through 53 ghostly stories: Brookeville to Gaithersburg, Poolesville, and Leesburg, Virginia; the C & O Canal to Rockville and Silver Spring; Chevy Chase and Washington, D.C. to Sandy Spring. Learn about the many ghosts, apparitions, and supernatural occurrences that can't be explained logically, including the Headless Horseman that continues to terrorize visitors to the old railroad bridge; the poltergeist that haunts the Madison House; the Tommyknocker at the Maryland Mine; and the farmer that keeps searching for his buried treasure. The history of gold mining, presidential politics, the Civil War, the burning of Washington during the War of 1812, the French and Indian War, and various important personages come to life through these mind-tingling stories. Are you brave enough to take this haunted journey back into time?

Peter Aykroyd spent his childhood watching his family's parlor séances through the crack of a basement door. Here, for the first time, Aykroyd tells the strange and delightful story that inspired his son, Dan, to make the mega-hit, Ghostbusters. Part history, part family legend, A History of Ghosts starts in 1848 in upstate New York, where the spiritualist craze first began. Aykroyd introduces the reader to notable mediums while telling the story of the development of spiritualism, interweaving a personal history marked by a fascination with ghosts and spirits with the larger narrative about the role the paranormal has played in our culture. Such legendary figures as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini appear and vanish. Everyone loves a good ghost story. Successful TV shows such as Medium and Ghost Hunters are proof that our national obsession with ghosts is here to stay. Millions of Americans believe in the paranormal—and even skeptics have heard a bump in the night and suspected it might be something supernatural.

Famed ghost hunter Hans Holzer once told an interviewer, “There are three dirty words in my vocabulary: belief, disbelief and supernatural. They don’t exist. There’s no ‘supernatural world.’ Everything that exists is natural. Yet there is a dimension of existence that is as real as your living room, even if the average person cannot access it with all their senses.” For five decades, this meticulous, Vienna-born researcher has been delving into manifestations that seem miraculous, moving among ghosts with a calm resolve that might have startled even the spooks. In book after book, he has documented these spirit presences, building an unprecedented bibliography of The Other Side. In Search of Ghosts brings together some of The Ghost Hunter’s famous, astonishing, and controversial cases. Holzer recreates eerie scenes with a skillful sense of telling detail. His long, deep immersion in the field is evidenced by the vast diversity of his subjects. He writes about Bavarian poltergeists and Connecticut “left behinds”; spectral murder victims and a ghostly spy courier who refuses to disappear; a noisy spirit in a San Francisco suburb and a Revolutionary War traitor whose imprint stubbornly remains. Some posthumous visitors tiptoe; others thrash; some require the gentle coaxing of mediums. Holzer brings alive not only phantoms who emerge from the shadows but also the average people whose everyday lives were interrupted by these unexpected nocturnal visitors and their intrusive rumblings. Like any good researcher, he realizes that context is everything. With tireless attention, he pursues his vaporish subjects back into history, separating the chaff from the wheat and puzzling out the true stories of their uneasy exits. For Hans Holzer, things that go bump in the night are no longer phenomena to be regarded with fear or awestricken wonder. In Search of Ghosts offers you a steadying hand as he escorts you into haunted realms you never imagined so vividly.

Are ghosts real? Are there truly haunted places, only haunted people, or both? And how can we know? Taking neither a credulous nor a dismissive approach, this first-of-its-kind book solves those perplexing mysteries and more--even answering the question of why we care so very much. Putting aside purely romantic tales, this book examines the actual evidence for ghosts--from eyewitness accounts to mediumistic productions (such as diaphanous forms materializing in dim light), spirit photographs, ghost-detection phenomena, and even CSI-type trace evidence. Offering numerous exciting case studies, this book engages in serious investigation rather than breathless mystifying. Pseudoscience, folk legends, and outright hoaxes are challenged and exposed, while the historical, cultural, and scientific aspects of ghost experiences and haunting reports are carefully explored. The author--the world's only professional paranormal investigator--brings his skills as a stage magician, private detective, folklorist, and forensic science writer to bear on a topic that demands serious study.

Vampires and werewolves; phantoms and phantasms: looming out of the fog leaps the menacing spectre of the lycanthrope, ghoul or blood-crazed zombie. Intrigued by some of the most sinister, yet at the same time most compelling, legends of western civilization, Gregory L Reece dusts down his stake and crucifix, loads his silver bullets and takes off into the wilds in search of answers and fresh adventures. Rummaging around in crumbling tombs and cobwebbed sarcophagi, his latest quest leads him into the haunted realm of the dead and the undead: of those carnivorous, nocturnal hunters that might perhaps better be left undisturbed. Why, he asks, is our culture obsessed by the eerie and the macabre? Why, despite its horrors, does the 'dark side' of the supernatural - its seances and ghost-hunting, demonic possession and the occult - call to us with such dangerous allure? Whether tracking night-stalking werewolves, chanting black magic mantras with Satanists, or interviewing a funereal modern-day Count Dracula, Reece is determined to uncover the truth. A wry exploration of a secret and secretive subculture, "Creatures of the Night" is at the same time a bold and startling journey into a wraithlike world that has so often seemed to lie beyond the limits of rational comprehension - until now.

Step into a haunting world of ghosts in stories, movies, reports of sightings throughout history, fakes, and more. Full-color illustrations throughout.

A “thought-provoking and powerful” study that reframes everything you’ve been taught about addiction and recovery—from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Myth of Normal (Bruce Perry, author of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog). A world-renowned trauma expert combines real-life stories with cutting-edge research to offer a holistic approach to understanding addiction—its origins, its place in society, and the importance of self-compassion in recovery. Based on Gabor Maté’s two decades of experience as a medical doctor and his groundbreaking work with people with addiction on Vancouver’s skid row, this #1 international bestseller radically re-envisions a much misunderstood condition by taking a compassionate approach to substance abuse and addiction recovery. In the same vein as Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts traces the root causes of addiction to childhood trauma and examines the pervasiveness of addiction in society. Dr. Maté presents addiction not as a discrete phenomenon confined to an unfortunate or weak-willed few, but as a continuum that runs throughout—and perhaps underpins—our society. It is not a medical “condition” distinct from the lives it affects but rather the result of a complex interplay among personal history, emotional and neurological development, brain chemistry, and the drugs and behaviors of addiction. Simplifying a wide array of brain and addiction research findings from around the globe, the book avoids glib self-help remedies, instead promoting a thorough and compassionate self-understanding as the first key to healing and wellness. Dr. Maté argues persuasively against contemporary health, social, and criminal justice policies toward addiction and how they perpetuate the War on Drugs. The mix of personal stories—including the author’s candid discussion of his own “high-status” addictive tendencies—and science with positive solutions makes the book equally useful for lay readers and professionals.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of Everything I Know About Love comes a smart, sexy, laugh-out-loud romantic comedy about ex-boyfriends, imperfect parents, friends with kids, and a man who disappears the moment he says "I love you." “An absolute knock-out. Wickedly funny and, at turns, both cynical and sincere… feels like your very favorite friend.” —Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of Malibu Rising ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, VOGUE, PEOPLE Nina Dean is not especially bothered that she's single. She owns her own apartment, she's about to publish her second book, she has a great relationship with her ex-boyfriend, and enough friends to keep her social calendar full and her hangovers plentiful. And when she downloads a dating app, she does the seemingly impossible: She meets a great guy on her first date. Max is handsome and built like a lumberjack; he has floppy blond hair and a stable job. But more surprising than anything else, Nina and Max have chemistry. Their conversations are witty and ironic, they both hate sports, they dance together like fools, they happily dig deep into the nuances of crappy music, and they create an entire universe of private jokes and chemical bliss. But when Max ghosts her, Nina is forced to deal with everything she's been trying so hard to ignore: her father's dementia is getting worse, and so is her mother's denial of it; her editor hates her new book idea; and her best friend from childhood is icing her out. Funny, tender, and eminently, movingly relatable, Ghosts is a whip-smart tale of relationships and modern life.