Ghost: Investigating the Other Side
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
With the same personal style in which she undertook Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today, Katherine Ramsland turns her “participant journalism” toward the world of ghost hunters. She’d acquired a reputedly haunted ring from a self-described vampire, and with it she moves right into the world of digital imagery, infrared videotaping, electronic voice phenomena, overnights alone in haunted rooms, séances, and ghost hunting. She once believed you just sat around in graveyards and waited for ghosts. How wrong she was! The extraordinary investigative memoir takes readers into the action, and they learn as Ramsland learns how to record the voice and image of a ghost. No stranger to risk, she does anything and everything to contact the paranormal. At the same time, she studies those around her who believe in these phenomena.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ramsland (author of numerous books on Anne Rice, vampirism and other ghoulish subjects) is just the sort of person you'd want to tell you a ghost story: credible, smart, sane and funny, neither a believer nor a skeptic. Cast as an adventure in "participatory journalism," the book begins with Ramsland's chance acquisition of a haunted silver ring. Determined to extract its secrets, she sets out on a quest that gradually turns into a full-blown investigation of psychic aberration in America. She plunges into the vast culture of ghost detection, sleeping in haunted bed-and-breakfasts from Salem to Sedona, familiarizing herself with the latest technology while also consulting conventional occult modes tarot, palm, Ouija. Charmingly understated at all times ("I never quite know how to talk to someone who lives simultaneously in two time periods"), Ramsland admits to being impervious to the spirit world; while psychics and sensitives of every description reel and recoil at the mere sight of her ring, she at first feels and sees nothing. Her gradual conviction, as she delves deeper and deeper into the realm of the unseen, that "something is out there" is all the more spine-tingling. Ramsland is a master of foreboding, and as her tale unravels, an explosive climax seems inevitable. What results more a creepy certainty than a frightful resolution may disappoint some readers. But whatever its payoff, the book will find avid fans among X-Files watchers, amateur ghost hunters, and the vast majority of those who feel that things that go bump in the night should be heard rather than seen.
