Includes spirits of cowboys, miners, railroaders, explorers, and Native Americans.

Tales of hauntings, strange happenings and other local lore throughout the Centennial state!

Welcome to a tour of the most spine-chiling places from around the world. Prepare for the frightful as this book looks past rusty iron gates and through creaking old doors. Inside lurk the spirits of not-so-dearly-departed ax victims, wronged women, levitating children and all sorts of things that go bump and boo in the night. Explore the dim halls of an abandoned insane asylum where thousands met slow downward spirals or death row at Alcatraz where voices still linger. Pitch a tent in a macabre suicide forest or watch your back in a Southern plantation where a triple-murderess won't stay dead. Descend into catacombs filled with lifelike mummies or stroll through a cemetery that hosts eerie rituals. And be sure to visit the real-life locations of your favorite horror movies and even browse the nastiest gift shops you've ever seen. Everyone with a taste for the spooky needs a copy of this book– it’s a scream!

During the Civil War, approximately 56,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in enemy military prison camps. Even in the midst of the war's shocking violence, the intensity of the prisoners' suffering and the brutal manner of their deaths provoked outrage, and both the Lincoln and Davis administrations manipulated the prison controversy to serve the exigencies of war. As both sides distributed propaganda designed to convince citizens of each section of the relative virtue of their own prison system -- in contrast to the cruel inhumanity of the opponent -- they etched hardened and divisive memories of the prison controversy into the American psyche, memories that would prove difficult to uproot. In Haunted by Atrocity, Benjamin G. Cloyd deftly analyzes how Americans have remembered the military prisons of the Civil War from the war itself to the present, making a strong case for the continued importance of the great conflict in contemporary America. Throughout Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century, Cloyd shows, competing sectional memories of the prisons prolonged the process of national reconciliation. Events such as the trial and execution of CSA Captain Henry Wirz -- commander of the notorious Andersonville prison -- along with political campaigns, the publication of prison memoirs, and even the construction of monuments to the prison dead all revived the painful accusations of deliberate cruelty. As northerners, white southerners, and African Americans contested the meaning of the war, these divisive memories tore at the scars of the conflict and ensured that the subject of Civil War prisons remained controversial. By the 1920s, the death of the Civil War generation removed much of the emotional connection to the war, and the devastation of the first two world wars provided new contexts in which to reassess the meaning of atrocity. As a result, Cloyd explains, a more objective opinion of Civil War prisons emerged -- one that condemned both the Union and the Confederacy for their callous handling of captives while it deemed the mistreatment of prisoners an inevitable consequence of modern war. But, Cloyd argues, these seductive arguments also deflected a closer examination of the precise responsibility for the tragedy of Civil War prisons and allowed Americans to believe in a comforting but ahistorical memory of the controversy. Both the recasting of the town of Andersonville as a Civil War village in the 1970s and the 1998 opening of the National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville National Historic Site reveal the continued American preference for myth over history -- a preference, Cloyd asserts, that inhibits a candid assessment of the evils committed during the Civil War. The first study of Civil War memory to focus exclusively on the military prison camps, Haunted by Atrocity offers a cautionary tale of how Americans, for generations, have unconsciously constructed their recollections of painful events in ways that protect cherished ideals of myth, meaning, identity, and, ultimately, a deeply rooted faith in American exceptionalism.

In Byron's Ghosts British and American scholars join together to overturn some of the prevailing assumptions that romance scholars have made about Byron, offering a fresh new reading of his poetry. Informed by recent critical theory focused on spectrality, they look at ghosts in his work, both in the conventional sense—what Mary Shelley once described as the “true, old-fashioned, foretelling, flitting, gliding ghost”—and in a postmodern sense, one concerned with a range of phantom effects. Balancing attention on these diverse concepts of the ghost, their essays complicate the popular images of Byron as a materialist, skeptic, and anti-Romantic, revealing crucial new insights about his poetry.

In this extraordinary and bold book, S.H. Clark explores and constructs a history of poetic misogyny. For the first time, a wide range of English poetry by men is examined for evidence of the articulation of heterosexual masculine desires. But Clark goes beyond a straightforward oppositional model of reading the male canon, to ask how we read this work 'after feminism', and whether it is possible to value these texts as misogynist texts in the light of feminist theory? Sordid Images is a challenging, controversial book. It will excite and unsettle its readers, and inspire many to look again at some of the cornerstone works of English literature.

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.

Wandering spirits, vengeful ghosts, and unexplained sightings in Tucson, Arizona. The benign, candle-carrying ghost of Mayor Levi Manning is reported to roam the halls of Manning House, while a frightening presence is said to lurk in the projectionist room at the Fox Theatre. In Room 242 of the Hotel Congress, guests have described a woman in white sitting at the end of the bed, while other spirits have been spotted in the halls. From the Mission San Xavier del Bac, built in 1700, to the grounds of the University of Arizona, stories of paranormal encounters abound. Join author Daryl F. Mallett and discover the thrilling and bone-chilling history of the Old Pueblo.

Established in 1831, Naperville is one of the oldest settlements in the Greater Chicago area. The city's rich and fascinating heritage has been carefully passed down from one proud generation to the next; however, nowhere has Naperville's ghostly oral tradition and haunted history been preserved until now. Most of Naperville's unique legends--compiled for the fi rst time ever in these pages--arose from accounts of actual historic events and from the lives of notable personages in the city's long history. As the tragic events and persons faded from living memory, all that might remain of them would be ghost stories whispered by fi relight and, later, by fl ashlight tucked under a teenager's chin at slumber parties. Some eerie legends in these pages have origins that are lost in time, and still other hair-raising ghost stories included in this work are chilling contemporary, firsthand accounts of paranormal encounters within Naperville's sprawling boundaries . . . perhaps from even just down the street.