Skeletal remains rotting behind cellar walls, temple priests removing brains with iron hooks, phantom locomotives roaring across midnight plains—Brian Righi isn't making this stuff up. The ghost stories he finds in history are far more chilling than any Hollywood horror scene.
Join the seasoned paranormal investigator on a tour through mankind's millennium-old obsession with death and the afterlife. Ghosts, Apparitions and Poltergeists surveys 4,000 years of hauntings and ghost huntings—from the embalming rituals of ancient Egypt to the Ouija boards and séances of nineteenth century Spiritualism—highlighting a few outlandish tales and colorful characters along the way.
Once you've learned the history, launch a paranormal investigation of your own with Righi's guide to modern ghost hunting, full of detailed advice culled from his seven years of experience in the field.
From Ghosts, Apparitions and Poltergeists, by Brian Righi Also known as typtology, table tilting is the phenomenon that occurs when a spirit moves, shakes, or rattles a table as a sign of its presence. Also an early form of spirit communication, its first description is handed down to us by Ammianus Marcellinus in fourth-century Rome. Marcellinus describes a table cut from a large slab of stone,...
From Poltergeist, by Colin Wilson At the age of forty-seven, Professor Cesare Lombroso was one of the most celebrated scientists in Italy. His book, Criminal Man(L’Uomo Delinquente) had made him an object of discussion throughout the world. What made it so controversial was Lombroso’s theory that the criminal is a degenerate “throw-back” to our cave-man forebears—a...
On the morning of March 26, 1997, San Diego police were called to a rented mansion in the upscale community of Rancho Santa Fe, California. There they discovered the bodies of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult who had each apparently taken their own lives in an act of mass suicide. Why? Because they had been convinced by their leader that... read this article
