Roaming Ghostland

Roaming Ghostland is about a defining moment both in modern European history and in the life of an idealistic young journalist who abandons everything to chase his dream as a freelance foreign correspondent covering the demise of East Germany after the Berlin Wall crashes down. Through the eyes of that young reporter, the book takes us deep into the soul of a country as it is being erased for all time, offering glimpses into the lives of ordinary people abruptly confronted with such alien concepts as capitalism, democracy, and personal freedom. He unmasks a land embroiled in chaotic, comical and horrific human drama. He stumbles upon mass graves and brutal neo-Nazi Skinhead attacks. He eats kangaroo soup; meets a psychiatrist lusting for Freud; follows East Germany’s first free elections and economic freefall; hawks chunks of the Wall; plays the black currency market and sips beer in a pub Napoleon frequented. He chronicles everything, knowing it will soon be lost to the ages. Sharing the writer’s odyssey along the way, we discover the joy and anguish of taking risks, confronting change, and seizing oncein- a-lifetime opportunities. By turns poignant, chilling, exuberant, and harrowingly humorous, Roaming Ghostland offers new insights into the uneasy melding of a unified Germany, as well as a vivid personal account of one man’s life-changing journey.

Roaming Ghostland is about a defining moment both in modern European history and in the life of an idealistic young journalist who abandons everything to chase his dream as a freelance foreign correspondent covering the demise of East Germany after the Berlin Wall crashes down. Through the eyes of that young reporter, the book takes us deep into the soul of a country as it is being erased for all time, offering glimpses into the lives of ordinary people abruptly confronted with such alien concepts as capitalism, democracy, and personal freedom. He unmasks a land embroiled in chaotic, comical and horrific human drama. He stumbles upon mass graves and brutal neo-Nazi Skinhead attacks. He eats kangaroo soup; meets a psychiatrist lusting for Freud; follows East Germany's first free elections and economic freefall; hawks chunks of the Wall; plays the black currency market and sips beer in a pub Napoleon frequented. He chronicles everything, knowing it will soon be lost to the ages. Sharing the writer's odyssey along the way, we discover the joy and anguish of taking risks, confronting change, and seizing oncein- a-lifetime opportunities. By turns poignant, chilling, exuberant, and harrowingly humorous, Roaming Ghostland offers new insights into the uneasy melding of a unified Germany, as well as a vivid personal account of one man's life-changing journey.

One of NPR’s Great Reads of 2016 “A lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories…absorbing…[and] intellectually intriguing.” —The New York Times Book Review From the author of The Unidentified, an intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history that 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.

Published in 1876, this work purports to recount the spiritual experiences of the mysterious aristocratic occultist 'Chevalier Louis de B.'.

1897 Spiritualism illustrated in a series of autobiographical sketches. Contents: Interesting Spiritual Mysteries & Experiences; Marvel of Magnetic Influence & Somnambulism; Magic; Flying Souls; How to Trace a Murderer; Occultism; Magicians & Spi.