The Wirral which Tom Slemen writes about in this fascinating book is a peninsula of ghosts, phantoms, spectres, doppelgangers, premonitions, reincarnations, astral voyages to another world and timeslips. The cases in Haunted Wirral confirm the old adage that truth really is stranger than fiction. Most ghost story books about Wirral include the same old weathered yarns about Mother Redcap's ghost and the spectres of smugglers, but the mysterious peninsula proved to be a stranger place than even Tom Slemen took it to be, with 51 tales weirder than anything found within the books of Stephen King, or Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. This edition includes a lost Wirral tale of Tom's that was recently found by the author concerning the "Thin Man" of Telegraph Road...

Presenting over 20 walks in Wirral, this title discovers the best of the local landscape, with sights spanning thousands of years of history, from ancient tracks to remnants of industrial past - from woodland heath to an expansive saltmarsh.

A fabulous collection of ghostly hauntings in Merseyside.

Stories are embedded in the world around us; in metal, in brick, in concrete, and in wood. In the very earth beneath our feet. Our history surrounds us and the tales we tell, true or otherwise, are always rooted in what has gone before. The spirits of place are the echoes of people, of events, of ideas which have become imprinted upon a location, for better or for worse. They are the genii loci of classical Roman religion, the disquieting atmosphere of a former battlefield, the comfort and familiarity of a childhood home. Twelve authors take us on a journey; a tour of places where they themselves have encountered, and consulted with, these Spirits of Place.

If you are looking for traditional, stereotyped ghost stories, this is not the book for you. You won't find any cliched, chain-rattling ghosts roaming castle ruins in Tom Slemen's Haunted Cheshire, nor will you encounter any of the regurgitated Cheshire legends which pad out so many books on supernatural folklore. Within this volume Tom Slemen has brought together a fascinating and thought-provoking collection of stories from his extensive files on the paranormal. During the research for his previous books on the ghosts of Merseyside, which resulted in the Haunted Liverpool series, he accumulated a wealth of material concerning the county of Cheshire. Most of the stories came from Cheshire people who heard Tom's spot on several local radio stations. Cheshire listeners bombarded Tom by telephone, letters, faxes and e-mail, with intriguing tales of ghostly hitchhikers, doppelgangers, curses, angels, time-warps, banshees, vampires, witches, warlocks, and spine-chilling premonitions. The response was phenomenal and quite unexpected. In Haunted Cheshire, you can read about the voodoo curse of the bus driver from Poynton, the Winsford vampire, the mummified lady from Hollinwood and many more chilling tales of ghosts, poltergeists and strange happenings from around the most haunted county in England.

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.