Hans Holzer's True Ghost Stories

I'm really interested in ghosts, having seen and experienced a few encounters with spirits of the deceased in my life thus far. Ghosts scare the hell out of me, but I suppose its human nature to want to learn more about what scares us. I received this book as a Christmas gift four years ago. I have read many, many books on ghosts and the study of ghosts, and most of them were flat-out horrible. This book is very well-written and was authored by a man who takes the study of ghosts very seriously. He fills the book with, among other things, recollections of subjects he had interviewed regarding their ghostly encounters. Some of them are downright scary, others are touching, and all of them are inexplicable, and as such cannot be easily debunked by skeptics. If you're tired of watching crap like "Ghost Hunters" on TV, where they never see the ghost and rely on questionable audio recordings to jump to conclusions regarding ghosts and hauntings, read this book. It's not the work of some amateur parapsychologist trying to score ratings for a TV show...it's the work of a dedicated scholar in pursuit of understanding the paranormal, and it's a very interesting read.

The first couple of chapters of Holzer's book run fast and seem to foreshadow a book that's easy to set aside. But once you start getting into the more lengthy descriptions and chapters, the book becomes much more interesting. For those who watch Sci-Fi's "Ghost Hunters", here's one of the first. Holzer actually did a series for NBC, "In search of..." The only disappointment was that these stories take place in the 1960's, 1970's at the latest. It makes you wonder if he's done any CURRENT research.