"An exceptional collection of ghost and haunting encounters—made even better because of Michelle Belanger's firsthand experience with them, on top of her extensive knowledge of the phenomena."—Loyd Auerbach, MS, parapsychologist and director of the Office of Paranormal Investigations Michelle Belanger's chilling collection of true ghost stories will take you further than you've ever gone before into the realm of spirits, astral entities, and dark forces. Along the way, you'll encounter haunted violins, dark fey, hell hounds, haunted cremains, and even an astral vampire summoned by an aspiring magician who becomes its unwitting target. Whether she's being accosted by an angry spirit who recently committed suicide or being driven out of haunted woods in a very Hitchcock-esque manner, Belanger's hard-won expertise and insightful commentary add both depth and context to her truly frightening—and sometimes dangerous—haunted experiences.
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
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.
An innovative collection of essays examining the sometimes paradoxical alignment of Realism and Naturalism with the Gothic in American literature to highlight their shared qualities Following the golden age of British Gothic in the late eighteenth century, the American Gothic’s pinnacle is often recognized as having taken place during the decades of American Romanticism. However, Haunting Realities explores the period of American Realism—the end of the nineteenth century—to discover evidence of fertile ground for another age of Gothic proliferation. At first glance, “Naturalist Gothic” seems to be a contradiction in terms. While the Gothic is known for its sensational effects, with its emphasis on horror and the supernatural, the doctrines of late nineteenth-century Naturalism attempted to move away from the aesthetics of sentimentality and stressed sobering, mechanistic views of reality steeped in scientific thought and the determinism of market values and biology. Nonetheless, what binds Gothicism and Naturalism together is a vision of shared pessimism and the perception of a fearful, lingering presence that ominously haunts an impending modernity. Indeed, it seems that in many Naturalist works reality is so horrific that it can only be depicted through Gothic tropes that prefigure the alienation and despair of modernism. In recent years, research on the Gothic has flourished, yet there has been no extensive study of the links between the Gothic and Naturalism, particularly those which stem from the early American Realist tradition. Haunting Realities is a timely volume that addresses this gap and is an important addition to scholarly work on both the Gothic and Naturalism in the American literary tradition.
"In this sequel to The Haunting of America and The Haunting of Twentieth-Century America, national bestselling authors Joel Martin and William J. Birnes set the stage for one of the great intellectual and spiritual awakenings that is currently challenging traditional belief systems. Reaching back into events that rocked the twentieth century, the authors show that, though denying the importance of a spiritual component in national policy, even the most conservative of governments have based social and financial policy decisions on a profound belief in the existence of the paranormal. The Haunting of Twenty-First-Century America is unlike any American history you will ever read--it posits that not only is the paranormal more normal than most people think, but that it is driving current events to a new "Fourth Culture" of the twenty-first century"--
Most of us have been perplexed by a strange sense of familiarity when doing something for the first time. We feel that we have been here before, or done this before, but know for sure that this is impossible. In fact, according to numerous surveys, about two-thirds of us have experienced déjà vu at least once, and most of us have had multiple experiences. There are a number of credible scientific interpretations of déjà vu, and this book summarizes the broad range of published work from philosophy, religion, neurology, sociology, memory, perception, psychopathology, and psychopharmacology. This book also includes discussion of cognitive functioning in retrieval and familiarity, neuronal transmission, and double perception during the déjà vu experience.
This book is about the Paranormal experiences that myself, two of my cousins, and our best friend had when we were teenagers. I had been exposed to a supernatural encounter when I was 5 years old, I was playing on the back porch at my Grandparents house, at a desk that my Grandmother had set up for her to use. I was sitting at the desk while my Mother helped my Grandmother in the kitchen, the back porch was just off from the kitchen, so they both could see me from the kitchen. I was writing in a notebook and I heard a pen or pencil roll off of the desk, I get out of the chair to see if I could find it, and as soon as I stoop to look under the desk, I clearly hear a mans voice say "Shoot". I was terrified and ran through the kitchen screaming. But that was nothing like what I would encounter as I got older. This book is based on our experiences with paranormal phenomenon. There is one incidence that is in the book that I would like to talk about here. All of the experiences that we had were frightening, but this one stands out in my mind. This particular incident scared me really bad, because I had never seen anything like it in my life. Nicholas was home alone and decided to go to the store to get cigarettes, he locked the door before he left and when he returned, he walked into a frightening scene. He unlocked the front door and walked in the living room to find all of the pictures on the wall turning in circles. There were at least thirty pictures in all, and every single one spinning on the wall. He ran to my cousins house, and told us what he had returned home to find. We decide to walk back over to his house. When we got there, Gwen opened the front door and screamed. We run up behind her to look into the house and what I saw sent chills down my spine. As Nicholas had said, every picture was spinning on the wall. We walk into the living room and Gabriella, Gwens sister, walks over to the pictures and looks behind them and they are spinning in mid air, theyre not hanging on anything. When she tells us, we ran out of the house. Just remembering this gives me chills.
In this sequel to The Haunting of America, national bestselling authors Joel Martin and William J. Birnes bring up to the present the story of how paranormal events influenced and sometimes even drove political events. In unearthing the roots of America's fascination with the ghosts, goblins, and demons that possess our imaginations and nightmares, Martin and Birnes show how the paranormal has driven America's political, public, and militarypolicies. The authors examine the social history of the United States through the lens of the paranormal and investigate the spiritual events that inspired momentous national decisions: UFOs that frightened the nation's military into launching nuclear bomber squadrons toward the Soviet Union, out-of-body experiences used to gather sensitive intelligence on other countries, and even spirits summoned to communicate with living politicians. The Haunting of Twentieth-Century America is a thrilling evidencebased exploration of the often unexpected influences of the paranormal on science, medicine, law, the government, the military, psychology, theology, death and dying, spirituality, and pop culture. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
There are few factual books written about poltergeist phenomena, John's Fraser's Poltergeist! A New Investigation Into Destructive Haunting fills that void, advancing and updating Colin Wilson's work Poltergeist!, this study's namesake from over 38 years ago. Fraser takes readers on a journey from the Borley Rectory to the Isle of Man, and grounds his readers in an historical overview of 'Poltergeist phenomena'. He examines where such events overlap with other paranormal investigations of 'apparitional' ghosts. What do they have in common, what do they differ? To answer this, Fraser looks to new research on paranormal events, never before published in book form. Fraser contends, perhaps controversially, that ghost sightings are and always will be ambiguous and near-impossible to prove, that only Poltergeist phenomena can be empirically verified.
Is San Diego’s renowned Tenth Avenue Theater home to an unlikely cast of ghosts — and if so, what has kept the spirits of the dead bound to this venue of entertainment and illusion? From reports of a child’s tragic death on the premises to a suicide stemming from overwhelming guilt, there is grief, turmoil, and unfinished business lingering within these walls. Alex Matsuo, an actress by day and a ghost hunter by night, was granted unlimited access to the haunted property where she has performed as an actor and staged professional readings of her plays. Investigating the popular and thriving theater she has always considered home, Alex must unravel the turbulent history of the building in order to find out why the ghosts of the Tenth never want to leave.
