Bebergal builds his own ghostly gadgets to reach the other side, too, and follows the path of famous inventors, engineers, seekers, and seers who attempted to answer life's ultimate mysteries. He finds that not only are technological innovations potent metaphors keeping our spiritual explorations alive, but literal tools through which to experiment the boundaries of the physical world and our own psyches.Peter takes the reader alongside as he explores: * the legend of the golem and the strange history of automata;* a photographer who is trying to capture the physical manifestation of spirits; * a homemaker who has recorded voicemails from the dead;* a stage magician who combines magic and technology to alter his audience's consciousness;* and more.

    

    From childhood in the Great Depression to opening esteemed eateries, it’s quite a story to tell. When she and her family launched Commander’s Palace, it became the city’s most popular restaurant, where famous chefs such as Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, and James Beard Award winner Troy McPhail got their start.Miss Ella of Commander’s Palace describes the drama, the disasters, and the abundance of love, sweat, and grit it takes to become the matriarch of New Orleans’ finest restaurant empire.

    It has been the subject of myth, legend, and folklore; the villain, and occassional hero, of films and novels. Today, the vampire is alive and flourishing in hit television shows, special night clubs, and even comic books.With more than 2,000 entries in A - Z format, The Vampire Encyclopedia offers information on a variety of subjects: the history of the vampire legend methods of finding and destroying vampires how to become a vampire the role of the vampire bat all about female vampires and much more! There are listings of films, appendices that list short stories and novels that feature vampires, even a listing of vampire societies and organizations. Whether traditional vampires or psychic vampires; historical vampires or vampires in poetry and art, they are all included in this comprehensive, single-volume reference guide to the undead.

    Enter the world of folklore, myth, and magic. Discover binding spells and banishing spells, spells for love, luck, wealth, power, spiritual protection, physical healing, and enhanced fertility drawn from Earth’s every corner and spanning 5,000 years og magical history. In The Encyclopedia Of 5,000 Spells: The Ultimate Reference Book for the Magical Arts, independent scholar, educator and author of several books of folklore, folkways, and mythology Judika Illes enables the reader to enter the world of folklore, myth and magic with binding spells and banishing spells, spells for love, luck, wealth, and power, as well as spells for spiritual protection, physical healing, and enhanced fertility drawn from Earth's every corner and spanning 5,000 years of magical history.

    Your students will gain an appreciation and understanding of ancient and modern cultures through myths and epics from the Middle East, Greece and Rome, the Far East and Pacific islands, the British Isles, Northern Europe, Africa, and the Americas. An introduction and historical background supplement each myth. Questions at the end of each selection prompt analysis and response.

    But little did he know that the very real trails he walked night after night would soon lead him into surreal encounters from a different dimension. This was never more evident than when the ghost of a recently fallen fellow agent began to appear on top of the cliff from which he died. It marked the beginning of the end to one of the most bizarre series of events in the history of the U.S. Border Patrol. This collection of true stories provides a rare look into law enforcement that includes not only the routine nightly patrols of the USBP but also actual paranormal activity as it happened to the agents in the field. Readers will go on nightly patrols with the agents of the Brown Field Border Patrol Station, and will face their worst fears as they come face to face with smugglers, mountain lions, ghosts, and even a Sasquatch in this isolated no-man’s land. OUT ON FOOT takes place in the mysterious Otay Mountains just east of San Diego, California. It is an emotional roller coaster ride that is not for the faint of heart.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    There, I underwent a life-changing experience. As I walked the beaches with the American veterans who had returned for this anniversary, men in their sixties and seventies, and listened to their stories, I was deeply moved and profoundly grateful for all they had done. Ten years later, I returned to Normandy for the fiftieth anniversary of the invasion, and by then I had come to understand what this generation of Americans meant to history. It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced."        In this superb book, Tom Brokaw goes out into America, to tell through the stories of individual men and women the story of a generation, America's citizen heroes and heroines who came of age during the Great Depression and the Second World War and went on to build modern America. This generation was united not only by a common purpose, but also by common values--duty, honor, economy, courage, service, love of family and country, and, above all, responsibility for oneself. In this book, you will meet people whose everyday lives reveal how a generation persevered through war, and were trained by it, and then went on to create interesting and useful lives and the America we have today."At a time in their lives when their days and nights should have been filled with innocent adventure, love, and the lessons of the workaday world, they were fighting in the most primitive conditions possible across the bloodied landscape of France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, and the coral islands of the Pacific. They answered the call to save the world from the two most powerful and ruthless military machines ever assembled, instruments of conquest in the hands of fascist maniacs. They faced great odds and a late start, but they did not protest. They succeeded on every front. They won the war; they saved the world. They came home to joyous and short-lived celebrations and immediately began the task of rebuilding their lives and the world they wanted. They married in record numbers and gave birth to another distinctive generation, the Baby Boomers. A grateful nation made it possible for more of them to attend college than any society had ever educated, anywhere. They gave the world new science, literature, art, industry, and economic strength unparalleled in the long curve of history. As they now reach the twilight of their adventurous and productive lives, they remain, for the most part, exceptionally modest. They have so many stories to tell, stories that in many cases they have never told before, because in a deep sense they didn't think that what they were doing was that special, because everyone else was doing it too. "This book, I hope, will in some small way pay tribute to those men and women who have given us the lives we have today--an American family portrait album of the greatest generation."                In this book you'll meet people like Charles Van Gorder, who set up during D-Day a MASH-like medical facility in the middle of the fighting, and then came home to create a clinic and hospital in his hometown. You'll hear George Bush talk about how, as a Navy Air Corps combat pilot, one of his assignments was to read the mail of the enlisted men under him, to be sure no sensitive military information would be compromised. And so, Bush says, "I learned about life." You'll meet Trudy Elion, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, one of the many women in this book who found fulfilling careers in the changed society as a result of the war. You'll meet Martha Putney, one of the first black women to serve in the newly formed WACs. And you'll meet the members of the Romeo Club (Retired Old Men Eating Out), friends for life.         Through these and other stories in The Greatest Generation, you'll relive with ordinary men and women, military heroes, famous people of great achievement, and community leaders how these extraordinary times forged the values and provided the training that made a people and a nation great.From the Hardcover edition.

    Sacred ruins, grand hotels, wildlife preserves, hilltop villages, snack shacks, castles, festivals, reefs, restaurants, cathedrals, hidden islands, opera houses, museums, and more. Each entry tells exactly why it's essential to visit. Then come the nuts and bolts: addresses, websites, phone and fax numbers, best times to visit. Stop dreaming and get going.This hefty volume reminds vacationers that hot tourist spots are small percentage of what's worth seeing out there. A quick sampling: Venice's Cipriani Hotel; California's Monterey Peninsula; the Lewis and Clark Trail in Oregon; the Great Wall of China; Robert Louis Stevenson's home in Western Samoa; and the Alhambra in Andalusia, Spain. Veteran travel guide writer Schultz divides the book geographically, presenting a little less than a page on each location. Each entry lists exactly where to find the spot (e.g. Moorea is located "12 miles/19 km northwest of Tahiti; 10 minutes by air, 1 hour by boat") and when to go (e.g., if you want to check out The Complete Fly Fisher hotel in Montana, "May and Sept.-Oct. offer productive angling in a solitary setting"). This is an excellent resource for the intrepid traveler.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

    Ghost stories as we know them did not develop until the late nineteenth century, but the restless dead haunted the premodern imagination in many forms, as recorded in historical narratives, theological texts, and personal letters. The Penguin Book of the Undead teems with roving hordes of dead warriors, corpses trailed by packs of barking dogs, moaning phantoms haunting deserted ruins, evil spirits emerging from burning carcasses in the form of crows, and zombies with pestilential breath.Spanning from the Hebrew scriptures to the Roman Empire, the Scandinavian sagas to medieval Europe, the Protestant Reformation to the Renaissance, this beguiling array of accounts charts our relationship with spirits and apparitions, wraiths and demons over fifteen hundred years, showing the evolution in our thinking about the ability of dead souls to return to the realm of the living--and to warn us about what awaits us in the afterlife.

    Ghosts lurk in Southern mansions and shriek around Northern fortresses. Even the spirit of President Abraham Lincoln, his life cut brutally short, still visits the White House. In these thrilling, chilling tales you'll read about America's bloodiest war and how it still haunts the nation — in more ways than one.

    series, comes something a little different, designed to send shivers down the spine: a book on America’s scariest haunted places. Some of these spirit-filled spots are well known and open to the public, while others are private residences that will have to remain intriguing from a distance: No visits allowed! The stories include firsthand tales that have a powerful “creepiness factor” and believability. The various sites include haunted houses, ghostly graveyards, cursed roads, eerie eateries, spirited saloons, and more. But be warned: This collection of true tales set in actual locations is so chilling that you may not want to read this alone at night!

    The forms they take, and the means by which they appear in the physical world, are cataloged. How they correspond to actual phenomena, such as death and pestilence, is likewise noted. Conway draws upon various writings within the Biblical scriptures, together with later works published in the Middle Ages and subsequent centuries, to arrive at his own comprehensive treatment of the subject. The second volume of the work concerns devils. Various figures such as Ahriman and Viswámitra receive chapters, in which the writings about them are quoted to form a complete image of their behavior and meanings. Appearances of devils in later works, such as the diabolical Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, are also cataloged. The overarching aim of Conway's thesis is to draw parallels between the various demonic and devilish phenomena, while noting their overall influence across the history of Christianity. The text is informative in tone and does not stray to dogmatism; Conway instead provides sourced information in a factual, studied tone. For his part, Conway was not a believer in the lore of demons. Although he served variously as a Methodist, Unitarian and Freethought minister in life, he had little time for the supernatural elements of Christianity. It is thus that Demonology and Devil-lore is an effort toward debunking and discounting what Conway viewed as the fantastical elements of a faith he otherwise identified with spiritually and morally. Today, Demonology and Devil-lore is somewhat archaic in terms of tone owing to its age. However, it still counts among the most thorough, in-depth and wide-ranging treatments of a subject which has fascinated religious and non-religious persons alike for centuries.

    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