Ghost States

For more than 15 years, best-selling author and historian Hampton Sides has traveled widely across the continent exploring the America that lurks just behind the scrim of our mainstream culture. In these two dozen pieces, collected here for the first time, Sides gives us a fresh, alluring, and at times startling America brimming with fascinating subcultures and bizarre characters who could live nowhere else. Following Sides, we crash the redwood retreat of a cabal of powerful military-industrialists, and more.

In the summer of 1846, the Army of the West marched through Santa Fe, en route to invade and occupy the Western territories claimed by Mexico. Fueled by the new ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” this land grab would lead to a decades-long battle between the United States and the Navajos, the fiercely resistant rulers of a huge swath of mountainous desert wilderness.

These are true ghost stories told by people from Washington State. These ghost stories have been featured in our first 12 books and our Pacific Northwest book and include: - ''... I felt like someone was looking at me. Then I heard other people entering the bunker. It sounded like they were carrying tools. When I got out of the room to see nobody was there...'' - ''...During a very trying time in our lives, he stroked our back as if to let us know that things would be okay. It seemed like there was possibly more than one unknown living with us, but we joked and called all of them ''Charley....

Fans of The Conjuring and The Amityville Horror will love this chilling new novel unraveling the tale of a family haunted by the ghosts of their malevolent ancestors’ disturbing past. The decrepit well has been a fountain of terror for generations, an abyss of dread that emits tragedy and death like fog. Its darkness touched Jacob’s soul some twenty years ago, and since moving back to his ancestral home, the chilling feeling of being in front of the old well hasn’t left his troubled mind. But this time, the shadows that creep from the well have taken on a malevolent sentience, ...

Li Lan, the daughter of a genteel but bankrupt family, has few prospects. But fate intervenes when she receives an unusual proposal from the wealthy and powerful Lim family. They want her to become a ghost bride for the family's only son, who recently died under mysterious circumstances. After an ominous visit to the opulent Lim mansion, Li Lan finds herself haunted not only by her ghostly would-be suitor, but also by her desire for the Lims' handsome new heir, Tian Bai. Li Lan must uncover the Lim family's darkest secrets before she is trapped in this ghostly world forever.

Jessamyn Teoh is closeted, broke, and moving back to Malaysia, a country she left when she was a toddler. So when Jess starts hearing voices, she chalks it up to stress. But there's only one voice in her head, and it claims to be the ghost of her estranged grandmother, Ah Ma. In life Ah Ma was a spirit medium, the avatar of a mysterious deity called the Black Water Sister. Now she's determined to settle a score against a gang boss who has offended the god - and she's decided Jess is going to help her do it.

"50 States, 50 Mysteries" is the ultimate travel guide for mystery enthusiasts, featuring unexplained phenomena, haunted places, true crime stories, and more from every corner of America. Take a journey through the country and explore the local legends and unsolved mysteries that make each state unique. Embark on a road trip like no other as you explore the paranormal activity and ghost stories that surround mysterious places and secret locations across the country. From strange occurrences to infamous crimes, this book has it all, providing a mix of true crime, folklore, and regional ...

Every state has an urban legend that evokes fear and curiosity in equal parts, and we've chronicled all of these logic-defying horrors here in the Haunted States of America anthology. From the Jersey Devil to La Llorona, each story included introduces a new chill inducing, stomach churning monster, specter, or poltergeist certain to keep you up at night. A broad ranging collection of authors, including seasoned veterans and some first timers making a fright-tastic debut, have all united to unearth the scariest lore from each state in the US, as well as D.C. and Puerto Rico.

When you need to mislead the enemy, who are you going to call? The Ghost Army of course! During World War II, this top secret group of artists and special effects experts worked to deceive German forces on the front lines. Using fake combat vehicles and artillery, dummies dressed as soldiers, and broadcasting the sounds of troops and equipment, the Ghost Army often tricked the Germans into believing U.S. forces were about to attack in one place while the real troops moved against another target.

North Georgia has more than forty lakes, and not one is natural. The state's controversial decision to dam the region's rivers for power and water supply changed the landscape forever.

From seances to shiny graveyards, take a ghostly journey across the United States. Visit the highways and byways of the supernatural across the country and in each state in the union. American Ghost Stories: True Tales from All 50 States tours possessed houses, unearthly burial sites, forbidding farms, sinister forests, school bathrooms, and all manner of places haunted by spectral visitors. More than merely a collection of fifty true ghost stories, American Ghost Stories puts you in the middle of the eerie action with captivating stories that would be at home at any midnight campfire.

Bestselling author and ghost historian MJ Wayland explores America's haunted heritage. As well as visiting some of the most famous ghost cases of the time, the author also uncovers ghost stories that have never seen print in over a hundred and fifty years!

Fans of Friday the 13th and Halloween will love this gruesome slasher following a group of teens hunted by a supernatural killer. You can run. You can try to hide. But no matter where you are, the scarecrow will find you. After a heart-wrenching breakup, the last thing high school sophomore Kyle Shoemaker expected was to fight for his life. But that’s exactly what happens after a drunken trip takes he and his friends to the abandoned farm at the edge of town. Nightly, the scarecrow claims one of them, leaving him with little time. Will he unravel the mystery of the scarecrow before it's ...

To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts us today, we must look closely at the way it ended. Between the 1770s and 1880s, emancipation processes took off across the Atlantic world. But far from ushering in a new age of human rights and universal freedoms, these emancipations further codified the racial caste systems they claimed to disrupt. In this paradigm-altering book, acclaimed historian and professor Kris Manjapra identifies five types of emancipations across the globe.

A ghostly witch named Bathsheba led the haunting of the Perron family, physically and psychologically tormenting them. This legendary ghost story eventually became the subject of the movie The Conjuring, and continued to haunt the Perron family for years to come.

The most horrific struggle of the American Revolution occurred just 100 yards off New York, where more men died aboard a rotting prison ship than were lost to combat during the entirety of the war. Moored off the coast of Brooklyn until the end of the war, the derelict ship, the HMS Jersey, was a living hell for thousands of Americans either captured by the British or accused of disloyalty. Crammed below deck - a shocking one thousand at a time - without light or fresh air, the prisoners were scarcely fed food and water.

An intricate tale of love, haunting memories, and renewal, Second Glance begins in current-day Vermont, where an old man puts a piece of land up for sale and unintentionally raises protest from the local Abenaki Indian tribe, who insist it's a burial ground. When odd, supernatural events plague the town of Comtosook, a ghost hunter is hired by the developer to help convince the residents that there's nothing spiritual about the property.

The question is not whether monsters walk among us. They do. They have. For thousands of years. On the borders of humdrummia and every day reality, be it the forest’s edge or a moonlit graveyard draped in gossamer spiders’ webs, the macabre is all about. For our souls, our sanity, the vital question to answer is: Just WHERE are all these blankety-blank monsters? Santa Clarita is a riparian bedroom community, an hour’s drive north of Los Angeles. It’s been home to giant, man-eating grizzly bears, ghosts, serial killers, devil cults, more ghosts, Bigfoot, werewolf encounters, UFO ...

Leaving the safety of America, Teera returns to Cambodia for the first time since her harrowing escape as a child refugee. She carries a letter from a man who mysteriously signs himself as "the Old Musician" and claims to have known her father in the Khmer Rouge prison where he disappeared 25 years ago. In Phnom Penh, Teera finds a society still in turmoil, where perpetrators and survivors of unfathomable violence live side by side, striving to mend their still beloved country.

Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention", must solve the mystery of this haunting.