Using his expertise as a famous ghost hunter, the author recreates the eerie scenes of astonishing and controversial cases that have not been solved.

From exploring the Tower of London to investigating a haunted Colorado firehouse, paranormal researcher Richard Estep takes you behind the scenes for an up-close-and-personal encounter with a fascinating legion of hauntings. This collection reveals some of the most chilling, captivating, and weird cases that Richard has investigated over the past twenty years, in England and in the United States. In Search of the Paranormal is filled with rich historical detail, present-day research, and compelling eyewitness accounts. You are there with the team at each haunted location: walking through a desecrated graveyard, shivering in a dark basement, getting thrown into The Clink, watching a "ghost-lit" stage in an old theater. Employing a variety of investigative methods—from high-tech gadgets to old-fashioned practices such as dowsing, table tipping, and Ouija boards—Richard Estep and his team uncover the dark mysteries of the paranormal realm. Praise: "This book is written from the heart. Believe in the paranormal or not, Richard Estep's words ring out with sincerity and integrity."—Patrick Burns, star of Haunting Evidence "Within these pages, you can join Richard on his ghostly adventures, from the UK to the US and experience with him what it's like to be a Paranormal Investigator."—Paul Bradford, star of Ghost Hunters International

Ghosts and spirits populate the world around us. We just need to be sensitive or psychic enough to hear and see them. In this book, author Paul Roland examines a fascinating assortment of recorded sightings from as far back in history as Roman times. This serious look at ghosts presents them not as chain-rattling spooks or clouds of cold, swirling mist, but as entities with which we share a greater reality. A comprehensive exploration of the realm of the supernatural, from ghost ships and poltergeists to out-of-body experiences and the idea of spirits as the manifestation of people still living, The Complete Book of Ghosts will challenge your beliefs and preconceptions as never before.

Explore haunted places of Montgomery County, Maryland, and its surrounding area through 53 ghostly stories: Brookeville to Gaithersburg, Poolesville, and Leesburg, Virginia; the C & O Canal to Rockville and Silver Spring; Chevy Chase and Washington, D.C. to Sandy Spring. Learn about the many ghosts, apparitions, and supernatural occurrences that can't be explained logically, including the Headless Horseman that continues to terrorize visitors to the old railroad bridge; the poltergeist that haunts the Madison House; the Tommyknocker at the Maryland Mine; and the farmer that keeps searching for his buried treasure. The history of gold mining, presidential politics, the Civil War, the burning of Washington during the War of 1812, the French and Indian War, and various important personages come to life through these mind-tingling stories. Are you brave enough to take this haunted journey back into time?

Famed ghost hunter Hans Holzer once told an interviewer, “There are three dirty words in my vocabulary: belief, disbelief and supernatural. They don’t exist. There’s no ‘supernatural world.’ Everything that exists is natural. Yet there is a dimension of existence that is as real as your living room, even if the average person cannot access it with all their senses.” For five decades, this meticulous, Vienna-born researcher has been delving into manifestations that seem miraculous, moving among ghosts with a calm resolve that might have startled even the spooks. In book after book, he has documented these spirit presences, building an unprecedented bibliography of The Other Side. In Search of Ghosts brings together some of The Ghost Hunter’s famous, astonishing, and controversial cases. Holzer recreates eerie scenes with a skillful sense of telling detail. His long, deep immersion in the field is evidenced by the vast diversity of his subjects. He writes about Bavarian poltergeists and Connecticut “left behinds”; spectral murder victims and a ghostly spy courier who refuses to disappear; a noisy spirit in a San Francisco suburb and a Revolutionary War traitor whose imprint stubbornly remains. Some posthumous visitors tiptoe; others thrash; some require the gentle coaxing of mediums. Holzer brings alive not only phantoms who emerge from the shadows but also the average people whose everyday lives were interrupted by these unexpected nocturnal visitors and their intrusive rumblings. Like any good researcher, he realizes that context is everything. With tireless attention, he pursues his vaporish subjects back into history, separating the chaff from the wheat and puzzling out the true stories of their uneasy exits. For Hans Holzer, things that go bump in the night are no longer phenomena to be regarded with fear or awestricken wonder. In Search of Ghosts offers you a steadying hand as he escorts you into haunted realms you never imagined so vividly.

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice A comprehensive, authoritative and readable history of the evolution of the ghost in the west, examining the behavior of the subject in its preferred environment: the stories we tell each other. "Roger Clarke tells this [the story that inspired Henry James' The Turn of the Screw] and many other gloriously weird stories with real verve, and also a kind of narrative authority that tends to constrain the skeptical voice within... [An] erudite and richly entertaining book." —New York Times Book Review No matter how rationally we order our lives, few of us are completely immune to the suggestion of the uncanny and the fear of the dark. 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.

Based on ethnographic research, this book examines the paranormal investigation subculture in the US. Presenting interviews with investigators as well as extensive field observations, it explores their reasons for getting involved, their use of different investigative methods, the interpretive processes by which they individually and collectively ‘sense’ spirits, the ways in which these processes are influenced by small group power dynamics, and what paranormal investigation ultimately means to those who participate. While focusing on the practices by which investigators ‘sense’ spirits in small groups, the author also situates paranormal investigation within a broader cultural context and attends to how investigators attempt to legitimize their practice despite being marginalized by both science and religion. A fascinating study of ghosts as an inherently social phenomenon, Sensing Spirits will appeal to sociologists with interests in ethnography, interactionism, cultural studies and subcultures.