A paranormal investigator and Old Louisville resident explores chilling reports of hauntings among the historic homes of the National Preservation District. The Louisville, Kentucky, neighborhood known as Old Louisville is one of the country’s largest National Preservation Districts 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 stories about the strange and unexplained phenomena they encounter in their historic homes. When David Dominé moved into one of these houses, he dismissed local rumors of a resident poltergeist named Lucy. But soon, disembodied footsteps and mysterious odors changed his mind. Now Dominé is one of Louisville’s best-known investigators of paranormal phenomena. In Phantoms of Old Louisville, Dominé recounts a horrifying encounter at the Spalding Mansion and the long history of the kindly spirit Avery, who guards the iconic Pink Palace. 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.

The imagined ghosts of Native Americans have been an important element of colonial fantasy in North America ever since European settlements were established in the seventeenth century. Native burial grounds and Native ghosts have long played a role in both regional and local folklore and in the national literature of the United States and Canada, as settlers struggled to create a new identity for themselves that melded their European heritage with their new, North American frontier surroundings. In this interdisciplinary volume, Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush bring together scholars from a variety of fields to discuss this North American fascination with "the phantom Native American." "Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence" explores the importance of ancestral spirits and historic places in Indigenous and settler communities as they relate to territory and history--in particular cultural, political, social, historical, and environmental contexts. From examinations of how individuals reacted to historical cases of "hauntings," to how Native phantoms have functioned in the literature of North Americans, to interdisciplinary studies of how such beliefs and narratives allowed European settlers and Indigenous people to make sense of the legacies of colonialism and conquest, these essays show how the past and the present are intertwined through these stories.

In May 2012 nearly thirty leading contemporary artists from throughout Asia will present arresting and provocative work at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Art objects from the museum's extensive collection of traditional art will be juxtaposed with the contemporary works—not so much to compare the past and present as to expand our imaginations beyond space and time into the spiritual world and the afterlife. Phantoms of Asia, the resulting publication, is a unique and intriguing exploration of the concept of Asia not as a block of political and economic interest but as an interconnected network of "phantoms" of invisible spiritual energy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.

Séances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes, the boundaries of the mind began to waver. Common Phantoms brings these experiments back to life while modeling a new approach to the history of psychology and the mind sciences. Drawing on previously untapped archives of participant-reported data, Alicia Puglionesi recounts how an eclectic group of investigators tried to capture the most elusive dimensions of human consciousness. A vast though flawed experiment in democratic science, psychical research gave participants valuable tools with which to study their experiences on their own terms. Academic psychology would ultimately disown this effort as both a scientific failure and a remnant of magical thinking, but its challenge to the limits of science, the mind, and the soul still reverberates today.

One of the Millions' "Most Anticipated" Books of 2019 Torn apart by war and bigotry, two families confront long-buried secrets in this haunting American novel of World War II and Vietnam. In the panoramic tradition of Charles Frazier’s fiction, Phantoms is a fierce saga of American culpability. A Vietnam vet still reeling from war, John Frazier finds himself an unwitting witness to a confrontation, decades in the making, between two steely matriarchs: his aunt, Evelyn Wilson, and her former neighbor, Kimiko Takahashi. John comes to learn that in the onslaught of World War II, the Takahashis had been displaced as once-beloved tenants of the Wilson orchard and sent to an internment camp. One question has always plagued both families: What happened to the Takahashi son, Ray, when he returned from service and found that Placer County was no longer home—that nowhere was home for a Japanese American? As layers of family secrets unravel, the harrowing truth forces John to examine his own guilt. In prose recalling Thomas Wolfe, Phantoms is a stunning exploration of the ghosts of American exceptionalism that haunt us today.

Traces the history of ghost phenomena through the ages and the ways in which people have tried to deal with the hope, the fear, the curiosity, and the disbelief which ghosts have aroused.