Ghosts are ubiquitous! This guide has 62 tours, which incorporate over 280 towns and villages, and more than 800 sites. Directions are given in each tour to enable the investigator to find the sites. Map references have been included using Ordnance Survey Maps, together with the map numbers, to enable the investigator to find the haunted sites. The purpose of the guide is to enable the enthusiast to seek and observe. There are notes of interest and history notes as the counties are awash with fascinating stories and legends. So decide which tour you are going to tackle first. You may wish to meet the phantom army at Thundridge Church ruins, the screaming woman in Water Lane, Bishop’s Stortford, the Witchfinder General, Mathew Hopkins at Manningtree, or maybe the ghostly monks carrying a coffin at Belchamp Walter.

The belief in the reality of demons and the restless dead formed a central facet of the medieval worldview. Whether a pestilent-spreading corpse mobilised by the devil, a purgatorial spirit returning to earth to ask for suffrage, or a shape-shifting demon intent on crushing its victims as they slept, encounters with supernatural entities were often met with consternation and fear. Chroniclers, hagiographers, sermon writers, satirists, poets, and even medical practitioners utilised the cultural ‘text’ of the supernatural encounter in many different ways, showcasing the multiplicity of contemporary attitudes to death, disease, and the afterlife. In this volume, Stephen Gordon explores the ways in which conflicting ideas about the intention and agency of supernatural entities were understood and articulated in different social and literary contexts. Focusing primarily on material from medieval England, c.1050–1450, Gordon discusses how writers such as William of Malmesbury, William of Newburgh, Walter Map, John Mirk, and Geoffrey Chaucer utilised the belief in demons, nightmares, and walking corpses for pointed critical effect. Ultimately, this monograph provides new insights into the ways in which the broad ontological category of the ‘revenant’ was conceptualised in the medieval world.

Presents a history and critique of a selection of the famous ghost stories from different countries, organized by such common themes as spectral armies, phantom women in white, haunted houses, screaming skulls, crisis apparitions, and ghostly lights.

Lord Halifax's Ghost Book - A collection of 'true' ghost stories collected by Lord Halifax, a Victorian English Viscount with an interest in the supernatural. Most document hauntings in the great houses of Britain, but there are interesting and eerie detours into prophetic dreams and ghostly warnings from beyond, and even an account of a vampiric cat!

This is the first comprehensive study of one of the most important aspects of the Reformation in England: its impact on the status of the dead. Protestant reformers insisted vehemently that between heaven and hell there was no 'middle place' of purgatory where the souls of the departed could be assisted by the prayers of those still living on earth. This was no remote theological proposition, but a revolutionary doctrine affecting the lives of all sixteenth-century English people, and the ways in which their Church and society were organized. This book illuminates the (sometimes ambivalent) attitudes towards the dead to be discerned in pre-Reformation religious culture, and traces (up to about 1630) the uncertain progress of the 'reformation of the dead' attempted by Protestant authorities, as they sought both to stamp out traditional rituals and to provide the replacements acceptable in an increasingly fragmented religious world. It also provides detailed surveys of Protestant perceptions of the afterlife, of the cultural meanings of the appearance of ghosts, and of the patterns of commemoration and memory which became characteristic of post-Reformation England. Together these topics constitute an important case-study in the nature and tempo of the English Reformation as an agent of social and cultural transformation. The book speaks directly to the central concerns of current Reformation scholarship, addressing questions posed by 'revisionist' historians about the vibrancy and resilience of traditional religious culture, and by 'post-revisionists' about the penetration of reformed ideas. Dr Marshall demonstrates not only that the dead can be regarded as a significant 'marker' of religious and cultural change, but that a persistent concern with their status did a great deal to fashion the distinctive appearance of the English Reformation as a whole, and to create its peculiarities and contradictory impulses.

****Updated and expanded including many illustrations by George Almond. Plus clearer translations of foreign terms. Ian Fleming's James Bond: Annotations and Chronologies for Ian Fleming's Bond Stories officially approved by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd (formerly Glidrose), with a Preface by Andrew Lycett and Forewords by Zoë Watkins, Publishing Manager, Ian Fleming Publications Ltd.; Raymond Benson, author of The James Bond Bedside Companion, six original 007 novels, and numerous non-Bond novels. This book is the result of analysis of each of Fleming's James Bond novels. Within are glossaries of applicable terminology and references with detailed chronologies of events including annotations. Detailed chronologies of events are represented at a day-of-week, month, day, year, and time-of-day level. Glossaries contain translations of foreign terms, annotations, and other information of interest such as detailed information on the origin of Saramanga's name (The Man with the Golden Gun). Maps have been created for many of the novels along with in-depth information concerning specific topics such as, the Moonraker bridge game and the Goldfinger golf game. In many instances, monetary amounts have been converted to their 2001 purchasing power equivalent. Differences found between published versions and the original Fleming manuscripts archived at Indiana University's Lilly Library have been noted.

Reports from countless far-flung places confirm the activity of spirit forces in certain well-known forms, such as apparitions, UFOs, poltergeists, disembodied noises, and mysterious ghost-lights. This book takes us on a fascinating world tour of old and new ghost stories, ranging from spooky Oxford colleges to distinctly modern hauntings via the computer and security camera.

Cavaliers and Roundheads are figures who appear in hundreds of English ghost stories. In this innovative account, Charles Esdaile argues that such tales are in reality folk memories of an episode of English history that was second only to the Black Death in terms of individual and collective suffering alike, and, further, that they reveal important truths about the way in which the conflict was represented: it is no surprise, then, to find that spectral Cavaliers are often romantic figures and revenant Roundheads grim ones full of menace. Yet, the book is no mere catalogue. On the contrary, rather than being discussed in a vacuum, the tales of haunting are rather set within a detailed regional history of the conflicts of 1642-1651 of a sort that has never yet been attempted, but is, for all that, badly needed.

Throughout history, the practice of exorcism has been used for the purpose of driving out evil spirits and demons though to possess human beings and the places they inhabit. But there are more startling instances where exorcism has been used: to cure a trawler that seemed to be cursed; to expel demons from Bram Stoker's black 'vampire' dog' even to rid Loch Ness and the Bermuda Triangle of their evil ambience. Peter Underwood explores this frightening ritual in relation to witches, vampires and animals, while his far-flung researches have unearthed dramatic cases in Morocco, Egypt, South Africa and the United States, as well as the British Isles. Is the rite an archaic throwback, wrongly employed in cases of mental disturbance which would be better served by psychological counselling, or is evil indeed a living force which can be overcome by the power of good? Exorcism! offers some thought-provoking insights into a mysterious and powerful phenomenon.