Yankee Ghosts: Spine-tingling Encounters with the Phantoms of New York and New England

Hans Holzer has travelled around the globe, pursuing restless spirits in a shadowy world.

This latest volume by the renowned parapsychologist is close to home and especially interesting to New England readers. The setting is the northeastern United States, and the characters are many and absorbing.

These are sharp and vivid stories of the author’s encounters with ghosts, meetings that support his view that ghosts are un¬happy people, ready to be sent beyond the veil. Dr. Holzer and a medium, in most cases the late Sybil Leek, investigated spectral phenomena in the private and public byways of many villages and cities — Rye, New York; New Ipswich, Whitefield, and Henniker, New Hampshire; Somerville, Rehoboth, Cohasset, and Boston, Massachusetts; New York City, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Staten Island.

Here are some of the characters you will meet: The Ghosts of Barbery Lane—Mrs. Wainright, a ghost who likes to slam doors and rattle through the attic; Marion Gernt, 300 years old and still suffering a fiery nightmare; Hungry Lucy—the ghost in June Havoc’s former townhouse on New York’s Westside, whose tapping sounds lead Dr. Holzer to a tale from the American Revolution; The Little Girl Ghost, a lonely, difficult girl who fell to her death in a haunted house in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania; The Somerville Ghost—cries in the night, and a grim story of murder.