Ghosts and Hauntings

by Dennis Bardens

Ghosts And Hauntings Bardens, Dennis

Genres: Nonfiction, Supernatural

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

Reviews

[Carole Tyrrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve always been fascinated by books on Ghosts and Hauntings sand this was a book I’d read some year s ago. When I found a bargain copy after having assumed it was long out of print.
Although Bardens’ style can seem a bit dry at times it didn’t sensationalise the often bizarre one-off experiences interspersed with very celebrated cases such as the Cock Lane Ghost and the Brown Lady of Raynham. But there’s also the woman who reported being in bed one night and seeing a small black skull float in through a window towards her.
True of false – all I know is that I currently work in a basement office alone so it soon became apparent that this wasn’t a book to read at work.

[Gunnjón Gestsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A interesting if repetitive book.

Most of the book is just one anecdotal tale of ghostly encounters after another. Genuinely interesting and eerie stories sometimes get very little attention while rather mundane tales are allowed to play out in minute detail. Two prime examples are a story about a woman seeing a jet black floating skull in her bedroom that flew towards her but disappeared inches away from her face as well as a testimony by a couple who claimed to have seen two disembodied spectral heads desperately fly past fleeing from a severed phantom hand. Both these bizarre stories only get one short paragraph each while the harrowing tale of some people who sometimes heard the sounds of wheelbarrows near their vacation home without one being visible gets several pages.


It's a decent enough read in small doses but does get a little receptive. For example a chapter entitled "Haunted Houses" is followed by one creatively called "More Haunted Houses". There's quite a few pages that are just variations of "Euinice Featherstonehaugh of Chunderbury, Scruntshire once saw a lady in an old fashioned dress briefly through a hedge." over and over again.

There's some short bits where the author explores the phenomenon more deeply such as one passage where he talks about professor Margaret Murray's theory that ghosts aren't actual souls but imprints left in the dust or atmosphere of certain rooms and that is why most hauntings take place in old badly ventilated buildings where the same dust has been floating around for decades or centuries.

It's a decent source of you just want a depository of real ghost stories but not particularly scary if that's what you're looking for.

[David Sheridan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A copy of this book was--for some unknown reason--on the bookshelves at home when I was growing up and I read it several times in my teens. Something reminded me of it recently and I went looking for a copy--got one through Amazon from a secondhand book dealer in the US for the princely sum of $12. The book covers a selection of real-life encounters with ghosts and various related eerie phenomena collected by the author--who was a reasonably well-known journalist at the time. He apparently placed some ads in the British press asking people to write and tell him of any supernatural experiences that they had, and the ad somehow got picked up by The New Yorker, so he ended up getting a lot of input from the US as well. He writes in an style that has a stiff-upper-lip tinge to it, and seems to have a preference for the experiences of the upper and upper-middle classes, so there are numerous stories from rectors, the daughters of rectors, and Lord and Lady such'n'such. The stories are related pretty much as he received them--sometimes even in the percipient's own words ("percipient" being his preferred term for a person who has perceived a supernatural event)--though he does seem to have physically gone and checked out some of them himself, and done some follow-up interviews with other witnesses. I'm reading it mainly for nostalgic value and really enjoying it.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting menagerie of legend, folklore, anecdote, and fact. Admittedly, the evidentiary value of many of the cases highlighted can be questioned or dismissed outright but nonetheless, Bardens's book is written in a brisk and accessible style - a fun read on a dark and stormy night.

[Cathy Rodriguez]

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