Ghosts

Hell has frozen over so let us look at frost portraits–images in icy windows with mystic or prophetic significance.

Today begins the Chinese Year of the Sheep—or the Goat—there seems to be some controversy about the precise animal, but be reassured that I am on the job and have you covered with stories of spooky sheep and a ghastly goat. Let’s start with the goat story, covered in these pages previously, but one of my favorites. […]

One Sunday morning in 1919, Dr. Russell H. Conwell, founder and President of Temple University, stood before his congregation in the pulpit of the Philadelphia Baptist Temple and dropped a bombshell–revealing that his dead wife had visited him repeatedly.

This excerpt from The Ghost Wore Black: Ghastly Tales from the Past, tells the story of a haunting love affair: a woman married to a ghost.

An unusual auditory token of death where the ghosts are heard and not seen, with dire results.

On 7 June 1903, Adelia A. Warren, Mrs. Robert Warren, of Bowdoinham, Maine, died, age 48, leaving behind a bereft husband and two sons: 28-year-old Randall S. and 33-year-old Edwin W. Just six months later, it was reported that Mrs. Warren, a Spiritualist, had returned to try to communicate with the family through a mirror.

The final chapter in my book The Ghost Wore Black: Ghastly Tales from the Past tells of a little-known 19th-century panic over those mistresses of the dark, The Women in Black. They were the female equivalent of Spring-heeled Jack, without the flames and (sometimes) the leaping, and they terrified communities across the United States from roughly 1865 to 1915.

Over the space of a lifetime, a man was haunted by a mysterious carpenter, whose presence meant death.

An 1880s rant against unwholesome Christmas ghost story horrors with a surprising suggestion for a supernatural substitute.