GHOSTS: Amazing and Extraordinary Facts

Spook, ghost, wraith, phantom, spectre - what do they all mean? Are they all synonyms and is there a whole parallel universe out there made up of these entities? Since the world began, the human race has entertained ideas of the dead returning to haunt or guide the living and every civilisation is said to have a belief in spirits and today countless examples are found among the indigenous cultures of North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Australasia. Our forebears in the classical traditions of Greece and Rome paid heed to ghostly machinations. Homer described Hades as a place filled with shadowy ghouls that cry out beseeching the living for libations of freshly spilled blood. Battlefields were littered with spirits of the dead. Those who ferry across the Styx in Charon's boat would see shoals of dead souls swarming about the in the Aeneid. Seers, oracles, mediums and séances, haunted houses, headless Anne Boleyn in Bloody Tower, spooks at Hampton Court, poltergeists, apparitions at Versailles, phantom monks, displaced coffins, photographic evidence of ghosts, sightings in hotels and restaurants, workplaces and wars. Read of poets like Robert Graves glimpsing the walking dead, nighttime apparitions at Avebury, a ghost town in Arizona, Flight 401 to Miami and the crash in the Everglades, the phantom Lancaster bomber and phantoms of the stage, Shakespeare, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and spiritualism, ghost books and films, the wail of the banshee and ghost hunting. Whether you want to explore the disappearances surrounding the Bermuda Triangle or uncover the ghostly goings-on in the Mary Celeste, here are spine-tingling stories of ghosts past and present and unexplained events worldwide. 144 well illustrated pages, woodcut illus.