Real Hauntings: True American Ghost Stories

Rating:
Summary: If You Like Summer Reruns, You Will Love This Book.
Review: I have been a Hans Holzer fan for many years and there is little doubt that he is the most widely read author of this type of book. Almost of the hauntings he writes about are those he has investigated for himself and he seems to only investigate well-documented cases where there are several living witnesses that he can interview. There is never any danger of picking up one of Holzer's books and being bored to tears with a bunch of old unsubstantiated folk tales.

"Real Hauntings" is a collection of some of Holzer's old investigations, mostly from the 1960s. He and his sidekick Sybil Leek, who is a medium, travel about the country investigating haunted houses and urging the ghosts to cross over to the other side. As usual, Holzer's writing style is superb. Even though he holds a Ph.D. he does not try to write in a pompous manner that is over most reader's head. The stories in this book are fun to read and I found it hard to put down. If you read this book at night while all alone you may have trouble sleeping for Holzer conveys the eerie nature of these haunts very clearly.

There is one major problem with this book however, and it is a problem that crops up with Holzer again and again. He likes to recycle his stories and if you have read previous books by this author you may have a strong sense of having read these stories before. I had this feeling and pulled out a couple of Holzer's other books that I have in my library. In checking just the first third of this book I found that five of the stories in this book were also in one of the author's books other two books I checked. Two more stories were in this book and also in both of the other two books. I don't know how many new stories were in this book, but I suspect there weren't many.

Try Holzer out because he has a great talent for this type of book. If you have never read Holzer before this book would be a fine one to read. On the other hand, if you have read any of Holzer's other books avoid this one for it seems to be only a collection of previously published stories.

Rating:
Summary: its ok
Review: this book is pretty good if you are looking for the science and documentation of ghosts, it has real hauntings from every part of america, like new england, new york, from pennsylvania to the midwest, the southern states, adn ghosts in california. I would reccomend this to anyone intersted in real ghosts.