The Ghost Handbook: An Essential Guide to Ghosts, Spirits, and Specters

Nearly everybody loves a good ghost story--and the best of them are tales that have some basis in fact. Author Robert Curran has compiled an impressive collection of just such stories--accounts of mysterious apparitions, haunted mansions, gloomy castles, and eerie cries in the night. For example, he tells the strange story of Matilda of England. In life she was the daughter of royalty, and was imprisoned in Mortemer Abbey, an edifice set in a gloomy French valley surrounded by dark, dense forests. Today, she is just one of several ghosts who haunt that abbey. Over the centuries, Matilda's ghost has been frequently seen walking in the abbey's corridors and gardens. Sometimes she is seen wearing black gloves, a sign that death will soon come to one of the local inhabitants. At other times she wears white gloves, which signify a wedding or a birth. From America's Deep South come yet more uncanny tales--for example, the haunted Hampton Plantation house in South Carolina, and the restless ghost of one of its owners, John Henry Routledge. He hanged himself after being rejected by his lover. These are just two among scores of chilling tales that will keep readers turning the pages of this handsome, color-illustrated book.