4 Books of Scary Stories and Haunted Places

If you enjoy reading this site's Your True Tales every month, then you'll love this collection of true stories. Jim Harold, host of The Paranormal Podcast, possibly the most popular podcast of its kind on the Internet, has put together this anthology of tales from one of his other podcasts: Jim Harold's Campfire.

On this show, Jim invites listeners to call in with their personal encounters with ghosts, monsters and other unexplained phenomena -- told as if we were all sitting around a crackling campfire in the middle of a dark forest. In this spooky atmosphere, his listeners have delivered some creepy stories, many of which are in this book.

The Campfire stories are divided into categories: Ghost Stories, Of Monsters and Aliens, Tales of Dreams and Death, Something Out of this World, and Eating My Own Dogfood -- that last one in which Jim relates some of his own unusual experiences. There are also two bonuses: the winner of the show's story contest, and a story called "Lucifer in the Lamp," which Jim has designated as the spookiest of the lot.

Many of the stories are truly frightening, while others will just have you scratching your head in puzzlement because they are just so weird.

It's books like this that remind us that just about everyone has a paranormal story to tell, whether it's happened to them personally, a friend or a family member. And that is evidence for how "normal" the paranormal really is.

If you have the good fortune to be able to travel around the U.S., Canada, and even abroad, you would be wise to help satisfy your craving for the paranormal by bringing along Jeff Belanger's great reference work, The World's Most Haunted Places.

Jeff is the founder of the Internet's GhostVillage.com and he has written several other books about ghosts, haunted places, and the supernatural. He brings to this book his extensive knowledge of these places where ghosts have been felt, heard, seen, and documented. In fact, he's investigated many of these creepy houses, hotels, castles, and institutions personally.

In this new revised edition of the book, Jeff gives us all the details on such far-flung places as: The Catacomb Museum in Paris, France; Big Nose Kate's Saloon in Tombstone, Arizona; Ordsall Hall in Salford, England; and the Alaskan Hotel in Juneau, Alaska -- among many others.

You'll be brought face-to-face with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln at the White House; Mercy Brown, the Rhode Island Vampire; Resurrection Mary at Resurrection Cemetery; and The White Witch of Rose Hall Great House -- and lots more.

Jeff has done a great job of presenting all of the folklore, haunted history, as well as the personal experiences of the people he has interviewed who have worked at, lived in, or visited these ghost-infested locations.

We go from the "world's most haunted" to the "world's creepiest"... and surprisingly there isn't much overlap. That's because author Bob Curran has really scoured the planet to find the creep factor in really out-of-the-way places and remote areas, many of which you probably haven't heard of before. In The World's Creepiest Places, he has really found amazing places and stories of their specters from all over the world.

For example:

• The Capuchin Cemetery in Palermo, Sicily, which has been described as "the realm of the living dead"
• Csejthe Castle in Csejthe, Hungary, where the ghost of Countess Elizabeth Bathory -- alleged to be a vampire and blood drinker -- still roams
• Eilean Mor in The Flannan Isles, Scotland, an isolated spot from which the lighthouse keepers mysteriously vanished
• Houska Castle in Blatce, Czech Repubic, thought to be one of the most haunted such structures in Europe, where a bloody, headless horse has been seen
• Mortemer Abbey in Normandy, France, where the ghost of the White Lady drifts through the ruins
• ...and many more exotic places.

Curran provides remarkably detailed accounts of these locations' dreary histories as well as the various phenomena that have been reported there. It's fascinating reading.

Ghosts, Spirits, & Hauntings: Am I Being Haunted is quite a different book than those listed above. This book is a collection of essays by some of the most respected, high-profile paranormal researchers around today, including Loyd Auerbach, Joshua P. Warren, Dr. Bob Curran (see above), Nick Redfern, Marie D. Jones & Larry Flaxman, Micah Hanks, and several others.

In these essays, each of these authors takes on a specific facet of haunting phenomena and presents their thoughts, theories, or the current explanations for them.

The first essay, "Haunted Houses: Theaters of the Mind" by Andrew Nichols I found to be one of the most interesting and thought-provoking in the book. In it he speculates on the many psychological factors at play in a person's experiences in a haunted location, which leads us to question how much of it is a product of the mind -- and which might not make it any less paranormal.

"The Immortals: Understanding Apparitions" by Joshua P. Warren is equally fascinating. What I admire about Joshua is that he is one of the few investigators out there who is always testing new ideas, trying new and innovative techniques, and experimenting with various technologies in interesting ways to try to understand ghost phenomena. In this chapter he explains some of his research into bio-energy fields and their possible connection to apparitions. He also provides some interesting ghost photos.

Other chapters cover poltergeists, the nature of ghosts, spirit release therapy, psychic phenomena, and spectral creatures.

I highly recommend this one for cutting-edge thinking.