Ireland is known as the Emerald Isle, a land of history and mystery, beauty and enchantment. But there's much more to this jewel of the North Atlantic than meets the eye. Hans Holzer is a renowned ghost hunter who has traveled the world trailing the elusive spirits of souls anxious to be sent beyond the Veil. Here he recounts his fascinating journey across this island in search of its soul...and its spirits. There is an 18th-century swordsman who defends the hidden treasure of Ballyheigue Castle, a proud house now gutted by fire; Princess Orloff, originally known as Angelica Parrott, who returned home to haunt a jealous sister; Lilith, a young inhabitant of eerie Skryne Castle, who was strangled with foxglove fronds in 1740; Mary Masters, a young girl who refuses to forget her horrible death and continues to haunt Dublin's Shelbourne Hotel; the ghost at Number 118 Summerhill, Dublin who sends workmen into a panic; and many more.

Irish Ghost Stories contains stories that tell of spooky goings-on in almost every part of the country. They include the tales of the Wizard Earl of Kildare, the Scanlan Lights of Limerick, Buttoncap of Antrim, Maynooth College's haunted room, Loftus Hall in Wexford, and an account of how the poet Francis Ledwidge appeared to an old friend in County Meath. The country of Ireland is full of old castles with secret rooms, and while some of the stories are obvious figments of lively imaginations, there are other tales that cannot be easily explained away.

22 Folk Tales from Ireland retold and illustrated by the author. One of Irish-American writer James Reynolds’ best works is this lively compilation of Irish ghost stories that reflects the rich Celtic imagination. First published in 1947, this compilation draws from his personal collection of over 200 tales, ranging from the tenth to the twentieth centuries, these 22 yarns are a mix of the eerie, the terrifying, and the madly comic. In “The Bloody Stones of Kerrigan’s Keep,” vengeful spirits from a centuries-old massacre terrorize all who come close to their fortress grave. In “The Headless Rider of Castle Sheela,” the ghost of a beheaded horseman continues to haunt his castle every Christmas day. You’ll meet the demonic harpies of “The Ghostly Catch,” the giddy spirits of the fashionable O’Haggerty twins, and the gluttonous ghost of Jason Bannott. Other tales include “The Weeping Wall,” “The Bridal Barge of Aran Roe,” “Mrs. O’Moyne and the Fatal Slap,” and more. Enhanced by Reynolds’ illustrations of Irish houses and their residents—both ghostly and human—this anthology is a treasure to savor.

Here are 125 magnificent folktales collected from anthologies and journals published from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with tales of the ancient times and continuing through the arrival of the saints in Ireland in the fifth century, the periods of war and family, the Literary Revival championed by William Butler Yeats, and the contemporary era, these robust and funny, sorrowful and heroic stories of kings, ghosts, fairies, treasures, enchanted nature, and witchcraft are set in cities, villages, fields, and forests from the wild western coast to the modern streets of Dublin and Belfast. Edited by Henry Glassie With black-and-white illustrations throughout Part of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

Is there a secret tunnel in O'Connell Street? Who stole the Irish crown jewels? And did the word 'quiz' originate in Dublin as the result of a bet? Urban legends are the funny and frightening folklore people share today. Just like the early folk tales that came before them, these stories are formed from reactions to events in the modern world, and are often a window into our current values. For the first time, Brendan Nolan explores the power of Dublin's urban legends – murky stories whispered in classrooms and backstreets, and ripping yarns passed on across the bar. Urban legends may sometimes just be the best of rumours, but the real question is about the truth that lies behind them?

Ranging from the 10th to the 20th centuries, these ghostly tales mix the eerie, the terrifying, and the madly comic. Features 22 short stories enhanced by the author's 30 illustrations.

Famed ghost hunter Hans Holzer once told an interviewer, “There are three dirty words in my vocabulary: belief, disbelief and supernatural. They don’t exist. There’s no ‘supernatural world.’ Everything that exists is natural. Yet there is a dimension of existence that is as real as your living room, even if the average person cannot access it with all their senses.” For five decades, this meticulous, Vienna-born researcher has been delving into manifestations that seem miraculous, moving among ghosts with a calm resolve that might have startled even the spooks. In book after book, he has documented these spirit presences, building an unprecedented bibliography of The Other Side. In Search of Ghosts brings together some of The Ghost Hunter’s famous, astonishing, and controversial cases. Holzer recreates eerie scenes with a skillful sense of telling detail. His long, deep immersion in the field is evidenced by the vast diversity of his subjects. He writes about Bavarian poltergeists and Connecticut “left behinds”; spectral murder victims and a ghostly spy courier who refuses to disappear; a noisy spirit in a San Francisco suburb and a Revolutionary War traitor whose imprint stubbornly remains. Some posthumous visitors tiptoe; others thrash; some require the gentle coaxing of mediums. Holzer brings alive not only phantoms who emerge from the shadows but also the average people whose everyday lives were interrupted by these unexpected nocturnal visitors and their intrusive rumblings. Like any good researcher, he realizes that context is everything. With tireless attention, he pursues his vaporish subjects back into history, separating the chaff from the wheat and puzzling out the true stories of their uneasy exits. For Hans Holzer, things that go bump in the night are no longer phenomena to be regarded with fear or awestricken wonder. In Search of Ghosts offers you a steadying hand as he escorts you into haunted realms you never imagined so vividly.

Luke Gibbons, a prominent Irish scholar and Joycean, here offers the first study to make a full and strong argument that Joyce's Irishness is intrinsic to his modernism. It was common in the first generations of Joycean criticism to attribute Joyce's modernism to European exile, and to portray Ireland as a romantic backwater, the source of the nets from which Joyce was trying to escape. Gibbons argues, by contrast, that the pressures of late colonial Ireland, a country at once inside and outside the world system, provided the ferment that gave rise to Joyce's most distinctive literary experiments. Crucially, Gibbons holds that Ireland features not just as "subject matter" or "content," but as "form." Gibbons further argues that Joyce's major achievement was to pioneer an idiom in which narrative is freighted with voices from both inside and outside a culture. Joyce's use of free indirect discourse opens inner life to other voices and shadowy presences produced by a late colonial culture at odds with its own identity. In this sense, Gibbons shows, Joyce's language is haunted by ghosts, by voices testifying to forces--technology, empire, urbanization--off the page. This book is sure to become a landmark study of this enduring and widely read novelist, and advances our understanding of the connections between modernism and the nation.

A New York Times Notable Book and Winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Neville's debut remains "a flat-out terror trip" (James Ellroy) and "one of the best Irish novels, in any genre, of recent times" (John Connolly). Northern Ireland’s Troubles may be over, but peace has not erased the crimes of the past. Gerry Fegan, a former paramilitary contract killer, is haunted by the ghosts of the twelve people he slaughtered. Every night, at the point of losing his mind, he drowns their screams in drink. But it’s not enough. In order to appease the ghosts, Fegan is going to have to kill the men who gave him orders. From the greedy politicians to the corrupt security forces, the street thugs to the complacent bystanders who let it happen, all are called to account. But when Fegan’s vendetta threatens to derail a hard-won truce and destabilize the government, old comrades and enemies alike want him dead.