Haunts Of The White City Ghost Stories From The World S Fair The Great Fire And Victorian Chicago

"At the close of the nineteenth century, Chicago offered the world a glimpse of humanity's most breathtaking possibilities and its most jaw-dropping horrors. Even as the White City emerged from the ashes of the Great Fire, serial killers like H.H. Holmes stalked the sparkling new boulevards and tragic accidents plagued the factories, slums and railroads that powered the churn of industrial innovation. Demons, mesmerists and birds of ill omen preyed on the unwary from the shadows. Ship captains spoke to the dead, while undertakers discovered reanimated corpses no longer requiring services. From posh mansions built on massacre grounds to the drowned quarries of a forest preserve, Ursula Bielski follows the dark undercurrents beneath the electric lights of the World's Fair."--

This chronicle of ghastly frights from the Motor City is not for the faint of heart. Founded on the legend of the Nain Rouge, Detroit has haunted hotspots aplenty, each with its own blood-curdling tale. Music from pianos that play by themselves and crying apparitions echo throughout The Whitney mansion. Beginning at the time of its construction, the Leland Hotel has been the site of an unusually high number of murders, suicides, and freak accidents. It has even been described as Detroit's portal to Hell. Various shadowy figures have been spotted darting throughout the former Detroit Police 6th Precinct building, including a mysterious boy. Join Michigan-based author and paranormal investigator Nicole Beauchamp as she leads you down some of Detroit's darkest corridors and into its tragic past.

More than 100 stories from haunted locales across the Prairie State. Compiled by Illinois's best-known author on the paranormal, Troy Taylor.

Bielski captures over 160 years of Chicago's haunted history with her distinctive blend of lively storytelling, in-depth historical research, and insights from parapsychology. 29 photos.

Ursula Bielski continues her collection of ghastly ghosts in this third volume of Chicago Haunts.

Ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are widely represented throughout modern culture. They can be found in any number of entertainment, commercial, and other contexts, but popular media or commodified representations of ghosts can be quite different from the beliefs people hold about them, based on tradition or direct experience. Personal belief and cultural tradition on the one hand, and popular and commercial representation on the other, nevertheless continually feed each other. They frequently share space in how people think about the supernatural. In Haunting Experiences, three well-known folklorists seek to broaden the discussion of ghost lore by examining it from a variety of angles in various modern contexts. Diane E. Goldstein, Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas take ghosts seriously, as they draw on contemporary scholarship that emphasizes both the basis of belief in experience (rather than mere fantasy) and the usefulness of ghost stories. They look closely at the narrative role of such lore in matters such as socialization and gender. And they unravel the complex mix of mass media, commodification, and popular culture that today puts old spirits into new contexts.

Lore of the Ghost is an original and thought-provoking exploration of the numerous categories of ghosts and hauntings throughout the world. It discusses the possible motives for each type of haunting? from phantom white ladies and spectral black dogs to haunted highways and ghostly vehicles—what they represent, why they occur, and their possible functions.