Particular stations and abandoned lines, many of which are in close proximity to burial sites from centuries ago, have given rise to unexplained events. This chilling book reveals well-known and hitherto unpublished tales of spirits, specters, and other spooky occurrences on one of the oldest railway networks in the world. The stories of sightings include the ghost of an actress regularly witnessed on Aldywch Station and the "Black Nun" at Bank Station. Eerie noises, such as the cries of 13 year-old Anne Naylor, who was murdered in 1758 at Farringdon Station, and the screams of children who were in an accident at Bethnal Green Station during World War II, are still heard echoing down the stations. These and many more ghostly accounts are recorded in fascinating detail in this book, which is a must-read for anyone interested in the mysterious and murky history of London’s Underground.

    Meet the cockneys, politicians, fairies, philosophers, gangsters and royalty that populate the city, their stories becoming curiouser and curiouser as layers of time and history are peeled back.Find out which tube station once housed the Elgin Marbles and what lies behind a Piccadilly doorway that helped Darwin launch his theory of evolution and caused the Swedes to wage war against Britain. Do you believe in fairies? Do you know which Leadenhall site became a Nag's Head tavern, morphing into the mighty East India Company, before taking flight as the futuristic Lloyds Building? Who named the Natural History Museum's long-tailed dinosaur Mr Whippy?Spanning above and below ground, from the outer suburbs to the inner city, and from the medieval period to the modern day, Londonopolis is a celebration of the weird and the wonderful that makes the mysterious city of London so magical.

    A must-have for fans of crime, horror, the supernatural and the simply bizarre, Bloody London will also show you:• Sites of executions and unsolved murders• London’s creepiest cemeteries• Where famous horror authors lived and worked• Where the Plague originated• A haunted churchand many other locations…London’s dark and shocking secrets are laid bare in this compendium of true stories. We dare you to look inside…

    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.From the Hardcover edition.

    Haunted Hollywood brings together more than two dozen stories about historic landmarks, theaters, watering holes, hotels, and houses that are haunted by movie stars, television personalities, and other celebrities.

    In this unusual and engaging work, Ackroyd brings the reader through time into the city whose institutions and idiosyncrasies have permeated much of his works of fiction and nonfiction. Peter Ackroyd sees London as a living, breathing organism, with its own laws of growth and change. Reveling in the city’s riches as well as its raucousness, the author traces thematically its growth from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Anecdotal, insightful, and wonderfully entertaining, London is animated by Ackroyd’s concern for the close relationship between the present and the past, as well as by what he describes as the peculiar “echoic” quality of London, whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens.London confirms Ackroyd’s status as what one critic has called “our age’s greatest London imagination.”

    What explains sightings of ghosts? Why do they fascinate us? What exactly do those who have been haunted see? What did they believe? And what proof is there?Taking us through the key hauntings that have obsessed the world, from the true events that inspired Henry James's classic The Turn of the Screw right up to the present day, Roger Clarke unfolds a story of class conflict, charlatans, and true believers. The cast list includes royalty and prime ministers, Samuel Johnson, John Wesley, Harry Houdini, and Adolf Hitler. The chapters cover everything from religious beliefs to modern developments in neuroscience, the medicine of ghosts, and the technology of ghosthunting. There are haunted WWI submarines, houses so blighted by phantoms they are demolished, a seventeenth-century Ghost Hunter General, and the emergence of the Victorian flash mob, where hundreds would stand outside rumored sites all night waiting to catch sight of a dead face at a window.Written as grippingly as the best ghost fiction, A Natural History of Ghosts takes us on an unforgettable hunt through the most haunted places of the last five hundred years and our longing to believe.

    Comprehensive and engaging, The Story of Ireland is an eye-opening account of a nation that has long been shaped by forces beyond its coasts.The Story of Ireland re-examines Irish history, challenging the accepted stories and long-held myths associated with Ireland. Transporting readers to the Ireland of the past, beginning with the first settlement in A.D. 433, this is a sweeping and compelling history of one of the world's most dynamic nations. Hegarty examines how world events, including Europe's 16th century religious wars, the French and American revolutions, and Ireland's policy of neutrality during World War II, have shaped the country over the course of its long and fascinating history. With an up-to-date afterword that details the present state of affairs in Ireland, this is an essential text for readers who are fascinated by current events, politics, and history.Spanning Irish history from its earliest inhabitants to the country's current financial crisis, The Story of Ireland is an epic and brilliant re-telling of Ireland's history from a new point of view.

    Read a succinct history of the Gunpowder Plot in just one hour.‘Remember, remember, the fifth of November’. The gunpowder plot is a famed tale of treachery that continues to fascinate and capture the imagination four hundred years on.The Gunpowder Plot in an Hour reveals the elaborate background to the infamous plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament and James I, the ultimate act of treason. This compelling and engaging account of one of the most famous historical events in English history follows the Catholic protagonists hatching their plan through to their inevitable, gruesome deaths.Learn who the Catholic traitors were, what drove them to such desperate measures, and how the plot was discovered. The Gunpowder Plot in an Hour gives a concise overview of this enduring event and is a must for all history lovers.Love your history? Find out about the world with History in an Hour…

    And a very strange, very English obsession. But where did this fixation develop? And what does it tell us about ourselves?In The Art of the English Murder, Lucy Worsley explores this phenomenon in forensic detail, revisiting notorious crimes like the Ratcliff Highway Murders, which caused a nationwide panic in the early nineteenth century, and the case of Frederick and Maria Manning, the suburban couple who were hanged after killing Maria's lover and burying him under their kitchen floor. Our fascination with crimes like these became a form of national entertainment, inspiring novels and plays, prose and paintings, poetry and true-crime journalism. At a point during the birth of modern England, murder entered our national psyche, and it's been a part of us ever since.The Art of the English Murder is a unique exploration of the art of crime and a riveting investigation into the English criminal soul by one of our finest historians.

    The personal, firsthand reports and chilling, full-length stories are bolstered by sidebars of actual accounts of "Ghosts in the News." Each chapter explores mysterious events-events that the reader will find hard to pass off as mere coincidence. In her quest to uncover explanations for each incident, Leslie Rule extensively researched library archives and interviewed credible witnesses, historians, renowned psychics, and parapsychologists. Throughout Ghosts Among Us, Rule's findings are mesmerizing. She writes about being raised in a haunted house. "To top that," Rule explains, "[my mother] introduced me to a serial killer when I was fourteen." The reader is invited to skip ahead to learn about that chilling episode...but the pages prior to that offer their own gripping, spell-binding encounters.

    Did you also know, for example, that there is a tiny, working jail cell that looks like a fat lamppost, situated at the southeast corner of Trafalgar Square, that still has a direct phone link to Scotland Yard? Or indeed, that the entrance to Buckingham Palace that faces down the Mall is actually the back door, not the front? Whether you're a visitor to the capital, a dailuy commuter or one its 7.5 million inhabitants, this book is an alternative, and often bonkers, guide to the city.

    The city is one giant grave, filled with the remains of previous eras. The Houses of Parliament sit on the edge of a former plague pit; St Paul's is built over human remains; Underground tunnels were driven through forgotten catacombs, thick with bones. A society can be judged by the way it treats its dead, and this is especially true of London. From Roman burial rites to the horrors of the plague, from the founding of the great Victorian cemeteries to the development of cremation and the cult of mourning that surrounded the death of Diana, Princess of Wales - Necropolis leaves no headstone unturned in its exploration of our changing attitudes towards the deceased among us.

    But even spending an entire day with Ozzy Osbourne wasn't as frightening as when he agreed to follow Philadelphia "demonologist" Lou Gentile on his appointed rounds. Will Storr never believed in ghosts—but his healthy skepticism couldn't explain the strange lights and sounds he witnessed, and the weird behavior of the occupants of several allegedly haunted houses.What resulted is a confirmed cynic's (and proud of it!) dedicated search for answers in a shadowy world of séances, mediums, devil worshippers—even the Vatican's chief exorcist. So get ready to confront the genuinely creepy along with the hilariously ridiculous in Will Storr vs. the Supernatural!

    Book by Woodyard, Chris