Ghostly Encounters

The Hauntings of Everyday Life

By: Dennis Waskul, Michele Waskul

Narrated by: James Killavey

"In the top corner of the window a pale, milky-white wisp is rising almost to the top of our ten-foot ceiling.... I am startled but not afraid.... Mostly, I am engrossed; I have never seen anything like this before (or since) and it fascinates me."

Dennis Waskul wrote these lines - about his firsthand experience with the supernatural - in the introduction to his beguiling book Ghostly Encounters. Based on two years of fieldwork and interviews with 71 Midwestern Americans, the Waskuls' book is a reflexive ethnography that examines how people experience ghosts and hauntings in everyday life. The authors explore how uncanny happenings become ghosts and the reasons people struggle with or against a will to believe. They present the variety and character of hauntings and ghostly encounters, outcomes of people telling haunted legends, and the nested consequences of ghostly experiences.

Through these stories, Ghostly Encounters seeks to understand the persistence of uncanny experiences and beliefs in ghosts in an age of reason, science, education, and technology - as well as how those beliefs and experiences both reflect and serve important social and cultural functions.

The book is published by Temple University Press.

©2016 Temple University - of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education (P)2016 Redwood Audiobooks

Fascinating

Fascinating stories. Found it hard to stop listening.
As for the narrator, I will give the same advice I have given in other reviews. People's taste in narrators vary tremendously. I like this guy but at least one other person did not so....Listen to the sample and decide for yourself.

Spookey

Got this to get in the mood for Halloween and boy did it work! Listened to the whole thing in one day! Great stories and very good narration.

Don't waste your money on this book

Would you try another book from Dennis Waskul and Michele Waskul and/or James Killavey?

When I first started listening to this audio book, I thought the problem with this book was going be the voice and the boring performance style. Since I myself am also doing research on ghosts and haunting, I forced myself to listen to the entire thing. But now, after having wasted some money and a lot of time on this book, I regret both of those, and my advice for you is not to do what I did. I have not learned hardly anything new or useful on ghosts or haunting, though I have heard a lot about the author and learned much about his fascination with himself.

Very detailed about the investigations

Not what I was expecting, author spent more time on telling how, when and why he interviewed people and visited places. Was more about how to interview and investigate haunted places than actual haunted stories.!! When he finally got around to telling the stories they were good but very slow to get started with the hauntings.