What does life ask of us, and how are we to answer that summons? Are we here just to propagate the species anew? Do any of us really believe that we are here to make money and then die? Does life matter, in the end, and if so, how, and in what fashion? What guiding intelligence weaves the threads of our individual biographies? What hauntings of the invisible world invigorate, animate, and direct the multiple narratives of daily life? In Hauntings, James Hollis considers how we are all governed by the presence of invisible forms--spirits, ghosts, ancestral and parental influences, inner voices, dreams, impulses, untold stories, complexes, synchronicities, and mysteries--that move through us and through history. He offers a way to understand them psychologically, examining the persistence of the past in influencing our present, conscious lives and noting that engagement with mystery is what life asks of each of us. From such engagements, a deeper, more thoughtful, more considered life may come. "James Hollis is the most lucid thinker I know about the complexities and complexes that interfere with living a full life.... He is one of our great teachers and healers." --Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

Old Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, is the third-largest National Preservation District in the United States and the largest Victorian-era neighborhood in the country. Beneath the balconies and terraces of the district's Gothic, Queen Anne, and Beaux Arts mansions, current residents trade riveting stories about their historic homes. Many of these tales defy rational explanation. When David Dominé moved into one of these houses, he dismissed local rumors of a resident poltergeist named Lucy. However, before long, unnerving, disembodied footsteps and mysterious odors caused him to flee his home in the middle of the night. Since that night, David Dominé not only embraced the possibility of supernatural phenomenon but also turned it into a popular tour series and best-selling collection of books, which have brought new attention to this iconic neighborhood. The book that launched the guided tours, Ghosts of Old Louisville, introduced readers to the hauntingly beautiful Lady of the Stairs and the Widow Hoag, who waits eternally near Fountain Court for a lost child who will never return. These tales of things that go bump in the night not only reveal why Old Louisville is considered the "most haunted neighborhood in America," but also help to preserve this historically and architecturally significant community.

From the mediums of Spiritualism's golden age to the ghost hunters of the modern era, Taylor shines a light on the phantasms and frauds of the past, the first researchers who dared to investigate the unknown, and the stories and events that galvanized the pubic and created the paranormal field that we know today.

Do spirits feel & think? Does death automatically promote them to a paradise-or as some believe, a hell?

From spooky state parks to real-life haunted houses, Ghosts and Hauntings of the Finger Lakes tells the stories behind the most supernatural sites around the shores of New York's famous Finger Lakes. Local paranormal investigator Patti Unvericht takes you on a journey to places such as the Elmira Civil War POW Camp, thought to be inhabited by the restless spirits of casualties of the war, to the State Theatre in Ithaca and even the tourist-friendly Geneva on the Lake, rumored to be haunted by past guests who have expired while staying at the historic hotel.

Ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are widely represented throughout modern culture. They can be found in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts, but popular media or commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from the beliefs people hold about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Personal belief and cultural tradition on the one hand, and popular and commercial representation on the other, nevertheless continually feed each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists seek to broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from a variety of angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.

From that cheerful puff of smoke known as Casper to the hunkiest potter living or dead, Sam Wheat, there is probably no more iconic entity in supernatural history than the ghost. And these are just recent examples. From the earliest writings such as the Epic of Gilgamesh to today’s ghost-hunting reality TV shows, ghosts have chilled the air of nearly every era and every culture in human history. In this book, Lisa Morton uses her scholarly prowess—more powerful than any proton pack—to wrangle together history’s most enduring ghosts into an entertaining and comprehensive look at what otherwise seems to always evade our eyes. Tracing the ghost’s constantly shifting contours, Morton asks the most direct question—What exactly is a ghost?—and examines related entities such as poltergeists, wraiths, and revenants. She asks how a ghost is related to a soul, and she outlines all the different kinds of ghosts there are. To do so, she visits the spirits of the classical world, including the five-part Egyptian soul and the first haunted-house, conceived in the Roman playwright Plautus’s comedy, Mostellaria. She confronts us with the frightening phantoms of the Middle Ages—who could incinerate priests and devour children—and reminds us of the nineteenth-century rise of Spiritualism, a religion essentially devoted to ghosts. She visits with the Indian bhuta and goes to the Hungry Ghost Festival in China, and of course she spends time in Mexico, where ghosts have a particularly strong grip on belief and culture. Along the way she gathers the ectoplasmic residues seeping from books and film reels, from the Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto to the 2007 blockbuster Paranormal Activity, from the stories of Ann Radcliffe to those of Stephen King. Wide-ranging, informative, and slicked with over fifty unearthly images, Ghosts is an entertaining read of a cultural phenomenon that will delight anyone, whether they believe in ghosts or not.