In the title story, on a murky evening in a warmly lit club off St James, a bishop listens closely as a paranormal detective recounts his most memorable case, one whose horrifying denouement took place in that very building. In 'The Front Room', a devoutly Christian mother tries to protect her children from the evil influence of their grandmother, both when she is alive and when she is dead. A lonely boy finds a friend in 'Boy Number 21', but years later he is forced to question the nature of that friendship, and to ask whether ghosts can perish in fires.This is Susan Hill at her best, telling characteristically flesh-creeping and startling tales of thwarted ambition, terrifying revenge and supernatural stirrings that will leave readers wide-awake long into the night.

    Alistair Gellis—rich, handsome, scarred by World War I, and obsessed with ghosts—has been summoned to investigate the spirit of nineteen-year-old maid Maddy Clare, who is haunting the barn where she committed suicide. Since Maddy hated men in life, it is Sarah's task to confront her in death. Soon Sarah is caught up in a deperate struggle. For Maddy's ghost is real, she's angry, and she has powers that defy all reason. Can Sarah and Alistair's assistant, the rough, unsettling Matthew Ryder, discover who Maddy was, where she came from, and what is driving her desire for vengeance—before she destroys them all?

    The lure of the Island has made it the top tourist destination in the state of Michigan. However, Mackinac Island holds many secrets. These secrets come in many forms—some from beyond the grave, others passed down for hundreds of years.If you have been to Mackinac Island many times before, or you have not yet visited this gem of the Great Lakes, the stories in this book will both inform and entertain you.Inside this book you will not only find many of the Island's ghost stories, legends, and tragic tales, but also a brief history describing each location. In addition, stories from the Straits of Mackinac, including deadly shipwrecks, ghost ships, and other tragedies, are included. Last, for those unfamiliar with ghostly phenomena, you will find a chapter with a crash course introduction to the who, what, when, why, and where of ghosts.

    Times are hard. Anne Chatham is a clever, modest young woman with little money, no prospects for marriage, and a never-shared secret—she can see spirits. Anne finds employment as a typist at Northfield House, the grand country manor of the Wellington family. Her employer, the wheelchair-bound Mr. Wellington, is kindly. His haughty wife is not. He has two handsome sons, the wry and dashing Thomas and the dark and somber Owen. Anne feels sure her prayers have been heard. Until the terrifying night she stumbles upon a tortured spirit roaming the dark halls of Northfield, a spirit that only she can see. In a search for answers, she finds herself drawn to Owen as they unearth a tragic story from the Wellington family’s past—a beautiful young bride gone missing on her wedding day. Then tragedy strikes again on the night of a glittering masquerade ball...

    But that’s only one of the 43 forbidding locations documented within these pages. Bold readers are invited to go on a world-spanning tour of haunted places, to meet ghosts, apparitions, and spirits such as the Windigo of the remote Canadian forests, which possesses unwary travelers and compels them to eat human flesh. Here also are such horrors as the moving coffins of Barbados, the Hungry Ghosts of China, and other bizarre manifestations of the spirit world. Truly a feast of shudders and thrills for all fans of the supernatural.

    But murder as sensation and entertainment became ubiquitous, with cold-blooded killings transformed into novels, broadsides, ballads, opera, and melodrama—even into puppet shows and performing dog-acts. Detective fiction and the new police force developed in parallel, each imitating the other—the founders of Scotland Yard gave rise to Dickens's Inspector Bucket, the first fictional police detective, who in turn influenced Sherlock Holmes and, ultimately, even P.D. James and Patricia Cornwell.In this meticulously researched and engrossing book, Judith Flanders retells the gruesome stories of many different types of murder, both famous and obscure: from Greenacre, who transported his dismembered fiancée around town by omnibus, to Burke and Hare’s bodysnatching business in Edinburgh; from the crimes (and myths) of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper, to the tragedy of the murdered Marr family in London’s East End.Through these stories of murder—from the brutal to the pathetic—Flanders builds a rich and multi-faceted portrait of Victorian society in Great Britain.  With an irresistible cast of swindlers, forgers, and poisoners, the mad, the bad and the utterly dangerous, The Invention of Murder is both a mesmerizing tale of crime and punishment, and history at its most readable.

    It is well-written in that competent British school boy fashion, with impeccable grammar, restrained wit, and conservative style.

    She's still reeling from the news when she's offered an unexpected solution: Mr Argenton, a wealthy stranger, asks for her hand in marriage.Marrying Mr Argenton will restore her family's fortunes and save them from scandal, but condemns Sophie to a life in Northwood, a vast and unnaturally dark mansion situated hours from civilisation.Sophie struggles to adjust to her new position as mistress over the desolate house. Mr Argenton's relatives are cold, and Mr Argenton himself is keeping secrets. Even worse, the house is more than it seems.Mr Argenton's young cousin, Elise, draws terrifying images. Doors slam. Inhuman figures slink through the forest surrounding the house. A piano plays in the middle of the night. Blood drips from the ceilings.Sophie is inevitably pulled towards the terrifying truth: Northwood's ancient halls are haunted by the family's long-dead ancestors. The malevolent spirits--produced by grisly deaths--resent her intrusion into their home.Trapped in Northwood and desperate for an escape, Sophie's fate is further complicated as she finds herself irrevocably drawn to the tall, dark-eyed man she married. She suspects her feelings are returned, but Mr Argenton is hiding the truth about the house--and his secrets are so dangerous that they might just be unforgivable.

    According to local lore, the troubled spirit of society belle Ladell Allen, who had mysteriously committed suicide in the master bedroom in 1948, still roamed the grand historic mansion. Yet, Mark remained skeptical--until he and his family began encountering faceless phantoms, a doppelganger spirit, and other paranormal phenomena. Ensuing ghost investigations offered convincing evidence that six spirits, including Ladell, inhabited their home. But the most shocking event occurred the day Mark followed a strange urge to explore the attic and found, crammed under a floorboard, secret love letters that touchingly depict Ladell Allen's forbidden, heart-searing romance--and shed light on her tragic end.This haunting true ghost story includes several photographs of the Allen House.

    On one side stood the shield-wall of the expanding kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. On the other side stood a remarkable alliance of rival kings – at least two from across the sea – who'd come together to destroy them once and for all. The stakes were no less than the survival of the dream that would become England. The armies were massive. The violence, when it began, was enough to shock a violent age. Brunanburh may not today have the fame of Hastings, Crécy or Agincourt, but those later battles, fought for England, would not exist were it not for the blood spilled this day. Generations later it was still called, quite simply, the 'great battle'. But for centuries, its location has been lost. Today, an extraordinary effort, uniting enthusiasts, historians, archaeologists, linguists, and other researchers – amateurs and professionals, experienced and inexperienced alike – may well have found the site of the long-lost battle of Brunanburh, over a thousand years after its bloodied fields witnessed history. This groundbreaking new book tells the story of this remarkable discovery and delves into why and how the battle happened. Most importantly, though, it is about the men who fought and died at Brunanburh, and how much this forgotten struggle can tell us about who we are and how we relate to our past.

    From the mythical beasts of ancient Greece to the hormonal vampires of the Twilight saga, monsters have captivated us for millennia. Matt Kaplan, a noted science journalist and monster-myth enthusiast, employs an entertaining mix of cutting-edge research and a love of lore to explore the history behind these fantastical fictions and our hardwired obsession with things that go bump in the night. Ranging across history, Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite tackles the enduring questions that arise on the frontier between fantasy and reality. What caused ancient Minoans to create the tale of the Minotaur and its subterranean maze? Did dragons really exist? What inspired the creation of vampires and werewolves, and why are we so drawn to them? With the eye of a journalist and the voice of a storyteller, Kaplan takes readers to the forefront of science, where our favorite figures of horror may find real-life validation. Does the legendary Kraken, a squid of epic proportions, really roam the deep? Are we close to making Jurassic Park a reality by replicating a dinosaur from fossilized DNA? As our fears evolve, so do our monsters, and Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite charts the rise of the ultimate beasts, humans themselves.

    Lankford also uncovers paranormal activities park visitors have experienced, such as the chupacabra that roams the swamps inside Big Thicket National Preserve and the teenage bigfoot who rolled a park service campground with toilet paper.She also reports on long-forgotten unsolved murders, such as the savage stabbing of a young woman on Yosemite's trail to Mirror Lake, and the execution style shooting of two General Motors executives at Crater Lake. The witnesses to the supernatural occurrences are highly credible people-rangers, park historians, river guides, and the like-and each tale has factual relevance to the cultural or natural history of the park.Haunted Hikes provides readers with all the information they need: for each hike: a "fright factor rating" is listed along with trailhead access information, detailed trail maps, and hike difficulty levels. Most of the haunted sites included in the book can be reached by the average hiker, some are wheelchair accessible, and others are for intrepid backpackers willing to make multi-day treks into wilderness areas. Intriguing photographs of many sites are included.Haunted Hikes is sure to satisfy readers looking for those spine-tingling moments when you begin to wonder if maybe, just maybe, we are not alone.

    But what are the origins of an actual bodily return from the grave? Does it come from something deep within our psyche, or is there some truth to it?In Zombies, Bob Curran explores how some of these beliefs may have arisen and the truths that lay behind them, examining myths from all around the world and from ancient times including Sumerian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Celtic. Curran traces the evolution of belief in the walking cadaver from its early inception in religious ideology to the "Resurrections" and cataleptics of 18th century Europe, from prehistoric tale to Arthurian romance. Zombies even examines the notion of the "living dead" in the world today--entities such as the "living mummies" of Japan.Zombies is a unique book, the only one to systematically trace the development of a cultural idea of physical resurrection and explore the myths that have grown around it, including the miracles of Old Testament prophets. It will interest those enticed by the return of the corporeal dead and also those curious as to how such an idea sits within the historical context.

    Like others, it offers a rich and spinetingling history of spectral sightings from ancient times through to the present day but unlike other ghost books it does not seek to convince the reader that such entities exist. Instead, the author accepts tha ghosts are a fact: apparitions that are a natural phenomenon, part of this world and part of its natural laws.

    R. James wrote his ghost stories to entertain friends on Christmas Eve, and they went on to both transform and modernise a genre. James harnesses the power of suggestion to move from a recognisable world to one that is indefinably strange, and then unforgettably terrifying. Sheets, pictures, carvings, a dolls house, a lonely beach, a branch tapping on a window ordinary things take on more than a tinge of dread in the hands of the original master of suspense.