For decades ghostly tales have been told across the land of enchantment. New Mexico's macabre past has created its share of phantoms. From by-gone gunfighters and wealthy socialites to murdered prostitutes and children, their tragic lives have left an imprint in time and legend. For 20 years ghost investigator Cody Polston has searched New Mexico's famous haunted locations for evidence of the supernatural. Now, for the first time, the complete findings of all of his investigations are revealed. The ghost stories and history of New Mexico's most haunted places are fascinating, but are they really haunted by ghosts?
There is a mystical quality to the land and sky in New Mexico. Places with long histories, such as New Mexico, breed superstition, carrying the memories, stories, and beliefs of those who have passed before. The state is such a notoriously superstitious place that real estate agencies post notices about whether a house is “truly” haunted, with pseudo-legal discussions about the need to disclose this information publicly. There is a haunted State Monument in Lincoln County, and a lovelorn ghost wanders through one of the state’s national parks. There are ghosts who are friendly and fearsome. Stories that have become fables, and others that are fully believed. Haunted New Mexico will occasionally ask you to suspend belief, showing those cracks between what is real and imagined.
When the railroad arrived in Albuquerque in 1880, a whole new town of stores and saloons sprouted along the tracks in tents and shacks. But just like the original settlement, which came to be known as Old Town, the additional districts produced their fair share of macabre tales and ghostly lore. At the KiMo Theater, the crew still leaves out donuts for the tragic young victim of a 1951 water heater explosion. A mysterious woman in a black dress visits the bar at the Old Albuquerque Press Club with an apparent hankering for gin. From inexplicable occurrences at the Old Bernalillo County Courthouse to infamous residents of the Fairview Cemetery, Cody Polston gathers enough of Albuquerque's haunted heritage to entertain the most dismissive skeptic.
Dark Angels Revealed highlights fifty of the most popular dark angels from pop culture novels, movies, and television including Rose Hunter of Vampire Academy and Damon Salvatore of Vampire Diaries. Each entry is a revealing look into each dark angel's strengths, weaknesses and special powers.
"Extraordinary . . . A transformative experience for the reader." —Lucy Sante "A large-hearted, wide-angled book . . . I couldn't put it down." —Ian Frazier A personal exploration of the American West and the work of one of America’s greatest photographers. Timothy O’Sullivan is America’s most famous war photographer. You know his work even if you don’t know his name: A Harvest of Death, taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. He was also among the first photographers to elevate what was then a trade to the status of fine art. The images of the American West he made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work “surrealistic and disturbing.” At the same time, we know very little about O’Sullivan himself. Nor do we know—really know—much more about the landscapes he captured. Robert Sullivan’s Double Exposure sets off in pursuit of these two enigmas. This book documents the author’s own road trip across the West in search of the places, many long forgotten or paved over, that O’Sullivan pictured. It also stages a reckoning with how the changes wrought on the land were already under way in the 1860s and '70s, and how these changes were a continuation of the Civil War by other means. Sullivan, known for his probing investigations of place in the pages of The New Yorker and books like Rats and My American Revolution, has produced a work that, like O’Sullivan’s magisterial photos of geysers and hot springs, exposes a fissure in the American landscape itself.
"There is a nuclear ghost in Minamisōma." This is how one resident describes a mysterious experience following the 2011 nuclear fallout in coastal Fukushima. Investigating the nuclear ghost among the graying population, Ryo Morimoto encounters radiation’s shapeshifting effects. What happens if state authorities, scientific experts, and the public disagree about the extent and nature of the harm caused by the accident? In one of the first in-depth ethnographic accounts of coastal Fukushima written in English, Nuclear Ghost tells the stories of a diverse group of residents who aspire to live and die well in their now irradiated homes. Their determination to recover their land, cultures, and histories for future generations provides a compelling case study for reimagining relationality and accountability in the ever-atomizing world.
