Spooky season is upon us! The line between real and unreal begins to blur in the month of October. To learn more about the legends and beliefs that influence our interest in the horrible and occult check out books on strange phenomenons, frightful folklore, and horror history in Homewood’s nonfiction section.
The Encyclopedia of Superstitions
Have you ever rubbed a frog on your freckles?
Trivia fans and fun fact fanatics will adore this fascinating, flickable encyclopedia of superstitions! Richard Webster presents over five hundred of the most obscure, curious, and just-plain-freaky superstitions of the Western world.
Discover batty beliefs about baldness, beans, and the Bermuda Triangle, and peculiar practices regarding hiccups, hearses, and hunchbacks. From modern myths to centuries-old lore, The Encyclopedia of Superstitions offers a wealth of wonderfully weird beliefs on just about every topic you can imagine.
Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places
An intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history, Ghostland takes readers on a road trip through some of the country’s most infamously haunted places—and deep into the dark side of our history.
Colin Dickey is on the trail of America’s ghosts. Crammed into old houses and hotels, abandoned prisons and empty hospitals, the spirits that linger continue to capture our collective imagination, but why? His own fascination piqued by a house hunt in Los Angeles that revealed derelict foreclosures and “zombie homes,” Dickey embarks on a journey across the continental United States to decode and unpack the American history repressed in our most famous haunted places. Some have established reputations as “the most haunted mansion in America,” or “the most haunted prison”; others, like the haunted Indian burial grounds in West Virginia, evoke memories from the past our collective nation tries to forget.
With boundless curiosity, Dickey conjures the dead by focusing on questions of the living—how do we, the living, deal with stories about ghosts, and how do we inhabit and move through spaces that have been deemed, for whatever reason, haunted? Paying attention not only to the true facts behind a ghost story, but also to the ways in which changes to those facts are made—and why those changes are made—Dickey paints a version of American history left out of the textbooks, one of things left undone, crimes left unsolved. Spellbinding, scary, and wickedly insightful, Ghostland discovers the past we’re most afraid to speak of aloud in the bright light of day is the same past that tends to linger in the ghost stories we whisper in the dark.
Haunted: On Ghosts, Witches, Vampires, Zombies, and Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural Worlds
An award-winning scholar and author charts four hundred years of monsters and how they reflect the culture that created them
Leo Braudy, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, has won accolades for revealing the complex and constantly shifting history behind seemingly unchanging ideas of fame, war, and masculinity.
Continuing his interest in the history of emotion, this book explores how fear has been shaped into images of monsters and monstrosity. From the Protestant Reformation to contemporary horror films and fiction, he explores four major types: the monster from nature (King Kong), the created monster (Frankenstein), the monster from within (Mr. Hyde), and the monster from the past (Dracula). Drawing upon deep historical and literary research, Braudy discusses the lasting presence of fearful imaginings in an age of scientific progress, viewing the detective genre as a rational riposte to the irrational world of the monstrous. Haunted is a compelling and incisive work by a writer at the height of his powers.
How to Make a Zombie: The Real Life (and Death) Science of Reanimation and Mind Control
Join a notorious pop-science punk as he investigates real zombie reports from around the world. It’s terrifying!
The search for the means to control the bodies and minds of our fellow humans has been underway for millennia, from the sleep-inducing honeycombs that felled Pompey’s army to the Voodoo potions of Haiti. Now, Frank Swain, the force behind Science Punk, has joined the quest, digging up genuine zombie research:
- dog heads brought back to life without their bodies
- secret agents dosing targets with zombie drugs
- parasites that push their hosts to suicide or sex changes
- the elixir of life hidden in an eighteenth-century painting
This mind-bending and entertaining excavation of incredible science is unlike anything you’ve read before.
Monster, She Wrote: the Women who Pioneered Horror & Speculative Fiction
Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature’s strangest tales, from Frankenstein to The Haunting of Hill House and beyond.
Frankenstein was just the beginning: horror stories and other weird fiction wouldn’t exist without the women who created it. From Gothic ghost stories to psychological horror to science fiction, women have been primary architects of speculative literature of all sorts. And their own life stories are as intriguing as their fiction. Everyone knows about Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein, who was rumored to keep her late husband’s heart in her desk drawer. But have you heard of Margaret “Mad Madge” Cavendish, who wrote a science-fiction epic 150 years earlier (and liked to wear topless gowns to the theater)? If you know the astounding work of Shirley Jackson, whose novel The Haunting of Hill House was reinvented as a Netflix series, then try the psychological hauntings of Violet Paget, who was openly involved in long-term romantic relationships with women in the Victorian era. You’ll meet celebrated icons (Ann Radcliffe, V. C. Andrews), forgotten wordsmiths (Eli Colter, Ruby Jean Jensen), and today’s vanguard (Helen Oyeyemi). Curated reading lists point you to their most spine-chilling tales.
Part biography, part reader’s guide, the engaging write-ups and detailed reading lists will introduce you to more than a hundred authors and over two hundred of their mysterious and spooky novels, novellas, and stories.
St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers
This exciting new guide to historic and contemporary horror, ghost and gothic writers features the men and women who’ve kept readers turning pages into the wee hours of the night. Your patrons with a penchant for this genre will find all the details they need to answer their questions on 450 authors. Author entries feature a biography; a complete list of the author’s publications; selected critical and biographical works; and comments by the entrant, when available. A critical essay written by an expert in the field helps readers better understand the author and his or her works.
Coverage includes these authors: Clive Barker Stephen Vincent Benet Mary Higgins Clark Douglass Clegg Isak Dinesen Nathaniel Hawthorne Shirley Jackson Doris Lessing H.P. Lovecraft Dorothy Macardle Joyce Carol Oates Edgar Allan Poe Anne Rice Martin Cruz Smith Fay Weldon Edith Wharton And many others A title index helps readers find entries even when they’re unsure of the author’s name. A comprehensive reading list helps your patrons find reference and critical sources to continue their research.
Stories from the Haunted South
When Alan Brown published his well-received Haunted Places in the American South, a kind of seance swirled around him. Locals who knew ghost stories began haunting him with ghoulish reports from houses, schools, libraries, sanitariums, inns, battlefields, train depots, radio stations, and bridges. Following these leads, he uncovered even more ghost-ridden southern locales.
In Kentucky’s White Hall, the ghost of Cassius Clay’s first wife Mary Jane roams the upstairs in a black dress, and the night air smells of candle wax, perfume, and bourbon. The spirit of a boy who died in a tragic accident half a century before plagues Mississippi’s Cahill Mansion.
Written in the vein of its successful predecessor, Stories from the Haunted South contains fifty-three accounts from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
Balancing the history with the legends of each supernatural locale, Brown focuses on personal stories of ghostly encounters. From folk archives across the South, Brown also includes nearly forgotten legends, such as the Headless Horseman of Hobkirk. With directions to each place, Stories from the Haunted South will be an important addition to the ghostlore of Dixie.
Alan Brown is a professor of English at the University of West Alabama. His books include Haunted Places in the American South and Shadows and Cypress: Southern Ghost Stories (both from University Press of Mississippi).
The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead
J. Gordon Melton has the credentials: he’s a religious historian, author of 25 books about religion and vampires, president of the American chapter of the Transylvania Society of Dracula (founded in Bucharest, Romania), and chairman of the committee that put on Dracula ’97: A Centennial Celebration in Los Angeles.
The Vampire Book is meticulously researched and well organized. Included are an article on the cultural history of the vampire; a historical timeline; addresses of vampire societies all over the world; a 55-page filmography; vampires in plays, opera, and ballet; a 13-page list of vampire novels; and an extensive index.
The A to Z entries, each with a short bibliography, include vampire lore in more than 30 different geographic regions and a comprehensive “who’s who,” and cover topics ranging from fingernails to sexuality, the Camarilla to Szekelys.
Werewolves
From ancient legend to pop-culture icon, from monster to antihero, here is a complete look at werewolves.
Fans of the complex beasts will howl with pleasure at this passionate handbook incorporating legend, lore, trivia, and art. Author Jon Izzard stalks both the fiction and the facts: transformations, inner rage, extra-human strength, silver bullets, mysterious curses, modern cures and more. With werewolves now haunting movie screens and literature the way they have haunted our nightmares for millennia, readers won’t wait for the full moon to devour this fascinating volume.
The World of Lore: Monstrous Creatures
A fascinating, beautifully illustrated collection of stories from the hit podcast Lore – now an online streaming series
They live in shadows – deep in the forest, late in the night, in the dark recesses of our mind. They’re spoken of in stories and superstitions, relics of an unenlightened age, old wives’ tales, passed down through generations. And yet, no matter how wary and jaded we have become, as individuals or as a society, a part of us remains vulnerable to them. Werewolves and wendigos, poltergeists and vampires, angry elves, and vengeful spirits.
In this beautifully illustrated volume, the host of the hit podcast Lore serves as a guide on a fascinating journey through the history of these terrifying creatures and explores not only the legends but what they tell us about ourselves. Aaron Mahnke invites us to the desolate Pine Barrens of New Jersey, where the notorious winged, red-eyed Jersey Devil dwells. Mahnke delves into harrowing accounts of cannibalism-some officially documented, others the stuff of speculation . . . perhaps. He visits the dimly lit rooms where séances take place, the European villages where gremlins make mischief, and Key West, Florida, home of a haunted doll named Robert.
The monsters of folklore have become not only a part of our language but a part of our collective psyche. Whether these beasts and bogeymen are real or just a reflection of our primal fears, we know, on some level, that not every mystery has been explained, and that the unknown still holds the power to strike fear deep in our hearts and souls.
As Aaron Mahnke reminds us, sometimes the truth is even scarier than the lore…
The World’s Most Haunted House: The True Story of the Bridgeport Poltergeist on Lindley
In this unprecedented work, the story of the 1974 Bridgeport,
Connecticut poltergeist is at last revealed. A crowd of more than 2,000 onlookers gathered. National media reported jumping furniture, floating refrigerators, and attacking entities.
Decades after the publicity quieted, more than 40 hours of never-before-released interviews with police officers, firefighters, and others tell the story as it actually unfolded:
- Relive the experience, the terror, the rampant emotions, and the unexplainable events that took place in that house as they happened.
- Have access to revealing excerpts from actual interviews, police reports, and rare documents.
- Access unreleased audio, poltergeist sounds, and an old radio broadcast.
Return to 1974 and feel the Lindley Street experience from the inside. Find out why it is deemed the haunting that should have brought the paranormal into mainstream science.
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