Ghosts: A Haunted History - Tapa dura

'Lisa Morton's brisk, handsomely illustrated Ghosts: A Haunted History canters through millennia of supposed uncanny interruptions with a kind of puckish scepticism ... Morton excels at presenting us with instances of the persistence of belief, across all times and cultures ... there are moments all the same when the hint of something truly uncanny is permitted to intrude.' - TLS 'In Ghosts, Lisa Morton brings her encyclopedic knowledge of folklore and the supernatural to bear on this vast, vital subject. For students of "things that go bump in the night" the book is simply indispensable.' - Leslie S. Klinger, author of The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft 'Ghosts is brilliant, insightful and scary as hell. Lisa Morton proves that truth is definitely stranger than fiction.' - Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of The Nightsiders and Ghostwalker

There is no more iconic entity in supernatural history than the ghost. From the earliest writings such as the Epic of Gilgamesh to today's ghost-hunting reality TV shows, ghosts have chilled the air of nearly every era and every culture in human history - yet there is little evidence to support their existence.This global history of these mysterious apparitions asks what exactly a ghost is, and examines related entities such as poltergeists, wraiths and revenants. Starting with the spirits of the classical world, including the five-part Egyptian soul and the first haunted house, Ghosts moves on to explore the frightening phantoms of the Middle Ages - which could incinerate priests and devour children - and the nineteenth-century rise of Spiritualism, a religious movement essentially devoted to ghosts. Ghosts around the world vary greatly, from the Indian bhuta to the Hungry Ghosts of China and the spirits of the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Along the way Lisa Morton gathers the ectoplasmic residues seeping from books and film reels, from the Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto to the 2007 blockbuster Paranormal Activity, from the stories of M. R. James to those of Stephen King.Wide-ranging and informative, Ghosts will fascinate anyone, whether they believe in ghosts or not.