In nineteenth-century London Lizzie Brown wants nothing more than to escape from the slums and her drunk, abusive father, so finding work and friends in a passing circus seems like a dream come true--but when she starts to have visions she finds herself confronting the mysterious phantom of London.

In rural Bethnal Green, Lizzie Brown takes pity on a couple of drunks and gives them a free palm reading. However, she is horrified when she has a vision of one of the pair meeting a great danger in a graveyard at midnight. She sees a huge black hound with flashing eyes mauling him. Lizzie and the Penny Gaff Gang track down the dog, who belongs to a ruthless team of professional grave robbers. It's up to the gang to expose their vile trade before they strike again.

"First published in 2014 by Curious Fox, an imprint of Capstone Global Library Limited."

"First published in 2014 by Curious Fox, an imprint of Capstone Global Library Limited."

When the circus arrives in Edinburgh, Lizzie finds herself in competition with a fraudulent medium and in the process meets the local wealthy mill owner and his very young orphaned niece Amelia, who becomes enthralled by the magic of the circus--and when Amelia disappears during a "fairy hunt" while Lizzie was watching her, she finds herself under suspicion and needs to use her own visions to find the kidnapper and save the child.

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.