It’s the bewitching time of year and it is also my favorite time of year! I absolutely love Halloween and all the spooky reads, especially this time of year. But to be perfectly honest, I can read a good ghost story any time of year. While I normally don’t read a lot of non fiction, sometimes truth IS stranger than fiction and I for one couldn’t pass on sharing a bit about this spooky non fiction read this Halloween season!
Last year for Christmas I actually bought this book for my sister and she absolutely loved it! Her an I both love ghost stories and when I saw this one I knew she absolutely needed it! I can’t wait to read this one and explore some of America’s haunted history. If you have a ghost story fan in your family this is a great gift not only for Christmas but you can always trick or treat someone with this lovely little number this Halloween!
It sounds like Dickey really digs into some creepy places here in America as really researches some of this history of these haunted buildings, locations, and homes. If you are looking for a spooky read this season but maybe fiction isn’t your thing, this would be an excellent choice, but even for us fiction fans it’s always fun to read about real haunted places. Keep reading for all the details—-if you dare!
Summary
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. (summary from Goodreads)
The Lit Bitch 