This is a book of ghost stories, and for the most part, ghosts are jealous monsters, intent upon our destruction. They never appear overtly here, yet we gradually become aware of their presence the way spirits in haunted houses trod over creaky floors, slam doors, and issue sudden gusts of wind. The poems are Koan-like—the fewer the words, the more charged they are. The engine driving this sense of haunting and loss is money, which Davis describes as “federal bone” boiling around us. Bison in Nebraska are reduced to bones, “seven/standing men/tall” fodder for the fertilizer used by farmers in the 1800s. Though they often specify dates, there’s an equality to the hauntings—every instance has its moment, and persists, despite being in the past, present, or future. If there really was a 1980 or 1848 or 1499, Davis implies it is somewhere. Index of Haunted Houses is spooky and sad—a stunning debut, one that will surprise, convince, and most of all, delight.

“When I was between the ages of five and eight, my sister and I slept in a large attic bedroom. At nightfall the room was filled with gypsies who glided around in clusters. They wore colorful thin flowing dresses and rummaged greedily through my drawers and books as if they would steal everything. I lay in bed as stiff as a board, trying to will myself invisible, praying they would not notice me looking . . . Daylight obliterated the gypsies, rendering them as thoroughly insubstantial as they had been real in the dark. I had a vague understanding that my vision was private, so I never told my family what I saw.” So began Corinne May Botz’s fascination with the invisible, a phenomenon that has profoundly influenced her approach to photography in style and subject matter. For more than ten years, she searched for ghost stories in buildings across the United States. She ventured into these haunted places with both camera and tape recorder in hand; her photographs, accompanied by first-person narratives, reveal a rare glimpse into American interiors, both physical and psychological. This book includes more than eighty haunted buildings, from the legendary to the ordinary, including Edgar Allan Poe’s house in Baltimore, a New Jersey tavern, and a Massachusetts farmhouse, a log cabin in Kentucky, and a number of private residences. The text includes ghost stories told to the author by those who lived through the moving rugs, creaking floors, apparitions, disappearing—and reappearing—objects, cries in the night, mysteriously burning candles, and other unexplained occurrences.

From Simon & Schuster, More Haunted Houses is a guide to cryptic hangouts and ghostly locales in the United States. From a robber's cave that echoes with voices of its past to America's own Loch Ness Monster to a vampire-infested cemetery, this fascinating companion volume to Haunted Houses USA takes us on a tour of some of America's spookiest places.

A handbook that gives addresses of places where ghosts have been authenticated, with directions for getting there to see for oneself.

DIVJoin paranormal expert and storyteller extraordinaire Hans Holzer as he investigates the most famous, and infamous, real-life haunted houses/divDIV Perhaps no other paranormal situation captures our imagination more than a haunted house. The idea of sharing a home with the dead is unsettling for the current inhabitants, but according to professor Hans Holzer, it can be equally as upsetting to the ghost. In The House Is Haunted, Holzer explores more than eighty haunted houses—all over the United States and abroad—dissects their history, and speculates on the reasons the otherworldly inhabitants continue to stay in their earthly abodes. /div