Halloween is upon us and nothing goes better with dark, chilly October nights than a good ghost story. Or a bunch of them.
Here are some of the best tales of terror and stories of spooks that your Kindle can scare up for you electronically. Some horror tales are found in the fiction section. But these books, I found in the — cue shrieking sound effect and fog machine — nonfiction section!
Ghostland An American History in Haunted Places
Checking out the tales behind haunted places and houses in the United States comes easy for Colin Dickey, the author of Ghostland. He grew up just a few miles from the Winchester Mystery House, one of America’s most famous haunted properties. In this book, he explores that place and a lot more. The places he talks about are divided into several sections: houses and mansions; bars, restaurants, hotels, and brothels; prisons and asylums, graveyards and cemeteries and a park. He also has a chapter on cities and towns.
Dickey quotes Joan Didion as one reason why this book exists. “We tell stories in order to live,” Didion said. Dickey writers that we tell stories of the dead to make sense of the living.
The Kindle costs about $12.99.
A Season With the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts
Ever been to Johnstown, Pennsylvania? They made a complete industry out of a disastrous flood.
How about Gettysburg? They turned a gruesome battle into a major tourist attraction.
For some reason, disasters sell.
And that’s why J.W. Ocker, an occult enthusiast and Edgar Award-winning travel writer, sets out for Salem, Massachusetts. He and his family moved to Salem during the witchiest time of the year — Halloween — in the witchiest city on the continent. A city, which just a few hundred years ago, sent 20 people to their graves for being accused of witchcraft. How the times change.
Salem is now not only a tourist hotspot, but it’s a spiritual center for believers in Wicca and the occult. In the book, Ocker presents multiple views of this phenomenon. He interviews the city’s leaders, residents, business people, entrepreneurs, tourists, street performers, along with its Wiccans and psychics. Critics are also given a fair hearing.
The Kindle goes for $9.99
Halloween: A History of America’s Darkest Holiday
How did Halloween — a celebration of everything spooky and weird — get to be the second most popular holiday on America’s calendar? David J. Skal will answer that for you. He traces the history of Halloween from an ancient Celtic religious festival to a small quirky celebration to a major holiday worth billions of dollars each year to retailers and entrepreneurs.
Halloween lovers of all types are interviewed in Skal’s book. The interviews offer a unique glimpse not just of this celebration, but of the American psyche, itself. However, it’s not just freaky fans that weigh in. Not everyone is happy with the interest in Halloween. Skal explores criticisms from the holiday’s detractors, especially from Christian fundamentalists, who believe Halloween is a Satanic inspired rite of passage… to hell.
The Kindle costs $13.77
Real Ghost Stories: Haunting Encounters Told by Real People
There’s no shortage of ghost stories at Halloween, but most of them are folklore and ghostlore. Authors Tony Brueski and Jenny Brueski say that ghost stories don’t all belong in the mythology section. They have heard thousands of — possibly true — ghost stories as hosts of the podcast “Real Ghost Stories Online,” a show called “group therapy for the paranormally affected.” They’ve compiled some of those stories in this Kindle.
Stories cover: haunted buildings and breweries, jealous demons and protective spirits, messages from returned relatives, ghostly battles from long-lost wars, exorcisms and dark energies, and graveyard explorations gone wrong.
This is a perfect collection for a Halloween night. Or, maybe it’s quite possibly the worst idea you’ve ever had for a Halloween night.
The Kindle is currently set at $8.71.
The Super Natural
Whitley Strieber gained fame for his run-ins with aliens. He basically started the whole rectal probe joke. But, Strieber, according to renowned Rice processor Jeffrey Kripal does not deserve this ridicule. In a fascinating back-and-forth exploration, Kripal and Strieber alternate writing chapters that explore both their own experiences of the supernatural — or super natural, as they name it — and some of the theories they think might explain it.
Along the way, they cover some pretty freaky ground: alien anal rape, bouncing blue oompa loompa-like creatures, and a host of other weird spooky encounters.
The authors’ conclusion might be even spookier. All of these creatures, that most cynics and scientists put on the shelf as either the fraud of a bunch of hucksters, or hallucinations of the mentally ill, are actually signs of a deeper, more meaningful reality, one that is more mindlike than matterlike, an imagination-generated reality where such things, as extradimensional beings, are not impossible at all.
This Kindle costs $11.99 right now.
The last person who would say they saw a ghost was Gary Jansen.
He was a well-established book editor at a prestigious bookselling firm in Manhattan. And he was a deeply committed Catholic.
Then, he moved back into his old childhood home. Almost immediately he began to experience strange phenomena. He felt a very real chill — or shock — when he entered his son’s room. He also saw shadow creatures flitting just outside his point-of-view.
Holy Ghosts is how he tries to come to grips with the notion that ghost, or ghosts, haunt his home and how he learns to reframe ghosts with his deep-seated Catholic beliefs. There actually is room for both beliefs, he finds.
Along the way, Jansen gets help from Mary Ann Winkowski, medium, author, and the real-life inspiration for TV’s The Ghost Whisperer.
The Kindle costs $13.99
Steve Volk had a childhood experience he could never shake. His house was haunted in a really vivid, obvious ways.
Since then, Volk has become the type of person that hardcore skeptics really hate. He’s a smart and balanced journalist who investigates the paranormal in the book, Fringe-ology. Volk focuses his keen, but balanced eye on a few topics in the paranormal world, like after death communication and the aforementioned haunted house of his youth.
It turns out, not all hardcore skeptics hate Volk. Some admit they both like and respect him.
Mat Johnson, author of Pym, writes, “Fringe-Ology brings a poet’s eye to the frayed edges between the known and unknown, belief and skepticism. . . . A dive into the paranormal even a hardcore skeptic like myself can enjoy.”
The Kindle is only $8.99