Lou Gentile – one of America’s top ghostbusters. For the last twenty years Lou has been battling the demonic and diabolical, helping the haunted and possessed of America. Derren Brown Investigates: The Ghost Hunter, Channel 4 2010
More recently there’s been a change in the way that ghosts are betrayed on the screen: now treated as real-life with real people and subject to serious investigation. ibid.
Nearly half of us believe in ghosts. ibid.
The only supernatural agents which can in any manner be allowed to us moderns, are ghosts; but of these I would advise an author to be extremely sparing. These are indeed like arsenic, and other dangerous drugs in physic, to be used with the utmost caution; nor would I advise the introduction of them at all in those works, or by those authors to which or to whom a horse-laugh in the reader would be any great prejudice or mortification. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 1749
Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary is said to be one of the most haunted places in America ... There are more ghost sightings here than anywhere else in the United States. Mystery 360: Ghosts Behind Bars, National Geographic 2010
Researchers are amazed and enlightened. So what some people perceive as ghosts could actually be the result of infra-sound. ibid.
There are twelve ghosts in Pluckley, plus one or two more who have shown on the scene recently. For a place this size that is quite phenomenal. As far as villages go this has got the most, undoubtedly the most, haunted village in England. Dennis Chambers, local historian, televised interview
The Borley Ghost: Weird Happenings at a Rectory. Daily Mirror headline; case investigated by Harry Price, author The Most Haunted House in England
I have to say this footage from Hampton Court Palace – if that is a ghost – is the world’s singular most incredible piece of ghost footage. Chris Everard, Lady Die
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Arthur C Clarke, 2001 A Space Odyssey
The ancient city of York boasts one of Britain’s weirdest sightings. In the shadow of the Minster stands what some people claim is the world’s most haunted building – Treasury House. An army of Roman soldiers is said to tramp through its cellars. Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World of Powers
She dematerialised, so then I knew that she was a ghost. Gerry Palus, Chicago, interview Arthur C Clarke’s World of Strange Powers, the legend of Resurrection Mary
We know the legend of Resurrection Mary. But no-one expects to hit her late one night coming home from their mother-in-law’s. Shawn and Geri Lape
We’ve had hundreds of sightings of entities, ghosts ... I enjoy these ghosts. They don’t bother me at all. I think they come up with some real clever little things. Barton Johnson, General Wayne Inn innkeeper, interview Unsolved Mysteries
January 1 1976 Amityville, NY, just after the clock rings in the 1976 new year Kathy Lutz puts her youngest child Missy to bed. And heads downstairs to sit in front of the fire. Suddenly a hooded figure materialises from the flames. A demon reaching out from another dimension. It was known the world over as the Amityville Horror. Mysteryquest s1e10: Amityville, History 2009
Disembodied voices, objects moving on their own, demonic spirits taking the shape of animals and children. ibid.
In a former sanatorium, said to be one of the most haunted homes in America, reports of paranormal activity include sudden drops in temperature, the appearance of ghostly figures, and disembodied voices uttering threats, such as Get out! A team is going to investigate whether Wolf Manor is indeed one of the most haunted homes in America. ibid.
We would call them ghosts but as a child I just knew them as faces and voices. The voices would be whispering and whispering at me. I would never quite hear what they would say. Sometimes they would call my name. Rosemary Altea, psychic Leicester England, cited Unsolved Mysteries
All argument is against it; but all belief is for it. Samuel Johnson
Some say there are spirits who walk among us. Claims of strange ghostly phenomena have been reported all over the world. Bizarre sounds. Mysterious photos. The Haunted: Paranatural, National Geographic 2013
No one testimony is proof that Muncaster is haunted, but to investigators these accounts over a long time add up to an impressive case ... In particular, who are the children said to be crying in the Tapestry Room? Strange But True?
The word spread around Uniondale [South Africa] like wildfire. There was a phantom hitchhiker on the N9. Within days the newspapers had got hold of the story ... The third appearance of the phantom hitchhiker was in 1980 ... Since then there have been numerous unconfirmed reports of the phantom hitchhiker. ibid.
The phantom hitchhiker story first came to prominence in Britain in the 1950s. Particularly on the A38. ibid.
Flitwick Manor has stood in the heart of the Bedfordshire countryside for over three hundred years ... At the end of last year builders moved in to renovate the manor. It’s now a hotel. They stumbled upon a secret room in the roof which had remained undisturbed for decades. After that things started to happen at Flitwick Manor. Just three days later the Hotel received an odd complaint from a departing guest. But from then on various members of staff began to notice that something had changed at Flitwick Manor. ibid.
Once one of Venice’s most splendid edifices the Campiello Albrizzi stands in the centre of the city ... A stylish backdrop to one wealthy English woman to entertain a group of glamorous friends ... The holiday was launched with a dinner party. Hostess Lady Carole Bamford, who had spent months planning the proceeding ... It was the story of the woman in the dining room portrait ... To make matters worse Venice experienced one of its worst thunder storms for years ... The Venetian holiday was over after just two nights ... The experience left an imprint on the lives of everyone. ibid.
6I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. Jack Kerouac, On the Road
‘The main thing about ghosts – most of them have lost their voices. In Asphodel, millions of them wander around aimlessly, trying to remember who they were. You know why they end up like that? Because in life they never took a stand one way or another. They never spoke out, so they were never heard. Your voice is your identity. If you don’t use it,’ Nico said with a shrug, ‘you’re halfway to Asphodel already ...’
He hated when his own advice applied to himself. Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
6They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs. Susan Hill, The Woman in Black
Truly the universe is full of ghosts, not sheeted churchyard spectres, but the inextinguishable elements of individual life, which having once been, can never die, though they blend and change, and change again for ever. H Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts. Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan sitting in her window, a bright vision in the gray light of that fall morning. His heart leaped up and although he didn't know it then, it was how he would remember her most clearly forever after – lovely Susan, the girl in the window. So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little. Stephen King, Wizard and Glass
The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines. Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost
Ghosts could walk freely tonight, without fear of the disbelief of men; for this night was haunted, and it would be an insensitive man who did not know it. John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
I have my own secret room with a moving wall and mirrors. That’s where I talk to Lee. His is the voice I hear in there. I feel his presence so very close to me. He is like my guardian angel. He’s even given me permission to record his theme song. Michael Jackson
Mary took the ghost story challenge seriously. Professor Robert Winston, Frankenstein: Birth of a Monster, BBC 2003
A few days after the ghost story challenge Mary was to have her famous dream. ibid.
‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us ... Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative ... On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story ... At first I thought but a few pages – of a short tale; but Shelley urged me to develop the idea at greater length. Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. ibid.
What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow. ibid.