This is great - I really enjoyed learning more about the history of spectres across the land, and where the ghost stories originate from. Very original in that it reads partly like a collection of ghost stories with specific places, and partly a history, and I guess some of E Jay Gilberts own experiences through her experience. Nicely written and easy to follow unlike some other texts I've read of a similar ilk. It is also BEAUTIFUL and would make the perfect gift! Loved this, thank you for letting me read and review

E. Jay Gilbert’s *Haunted: Ghost Stories and Their Afterlives* is a thought-provoking exploration of the supernatural that goes beyond mere ghostly thrills. Part-memoir, part-cultural analysis, the book delves into the universal fascination with ghost stories, blending spine-chilling tales with insightful commentary on why we tell them—and what they reveal about us.

Gilbert, who has spent years collecting local ghost stories from her village near Newcastle, uncovers an intriguing paradox: while many ghosts are unique to their locations, the themes and emotions they evoke are eerily similar across cultures and generations. From the ubiquitous "White Ladies" to tales of haunted roads and spectral apparitions, the book highlights the shared nature of these stories while inviting readers to reflect on why certain tropes persist. In doing so, *Haunted* asks deeper questions: Are we more interested in the identity of the ghost or in how their presence makes us feel? What do these stories tell us about the communities that foster them?

The book is as much about the tellers as it is about the ghosts themselves. Gilbert reflects on how ghost stories act as cultural artifacts, offering glimpses into the fears, desires, and anxieties of the people who share them. She also examines how these tales evolve over time, adapting to new generations and technologies while retaining their core elements of mystery and fear. The book's mix of memoir and cultural analysis enriches the storytelling experience, making it not just a collection of ghost stories but also a meditation on why we are so drawn to the supernatural.

While *Haunted* offers plenty of eerie moments—enough to satisfy readers looking for a bit of a scare—it stands out for its focus on the psychological and social aspects of ghost-telling. Gilbert strikes a careful balance between entertainment and scholarly insight, making the book accessible to both skeptics and believers. Whether you’re fascinated by the paranormal or simply intrigued by why certain stories endure, *Haunted* provides an engaging journey through the eerie, the inexplicable, and the all-too-human.

For those interested in the intersection of folklore, psychology, and history, *Haunted* offers a fresh perspective on the ghost story tradition. It’s a must-read for anyone curious about what our ghosts say about us—and why, no matter where we live, we seem to know the same spectres.

Haunted looks at the phenomena of ghosts & hauntings & asks why we are so fascinated by ghost stories & more importantly what do they tell us about us? As someone who has had probably more than their fair share of spooky experiences, I was intrigued by the synopsis for this one.

Now we're talking! Really enjoyed this book about the nature & role of ghosts & hauntings (alongside other beings such as goblins & fairies) in society. I can't say I agree with all the author's conclusions as I am most definitely interested in the actual hauntings & not just the experience, but there were some insightful musings, not least on why an empty or abandoned building seems so eerie to us. Let's face it though - we're all here for the scary stories & the experiences related to the author for the book were very unsettling indeed. I had to read this in the early evening so that as soon as it went dark outside, I could switch to something a little lighter. Fascinating read.

My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Bonnier Books/Manilla Press, for the opportunity t0 read an ARC.

This was interesting to a point but I think I was hoping for something more like Edward Parnell’s Ghostland. The focus here was on the personal experience of a witness sighting something supernatural, rather than the potential history or explanation of the entity. It was also focused on folklore (great) without modern or contextual cultural history (not so good). Folklore is a product of its time and evolves over time. I don’t feel that was explored enough. An unfair comparison but just not quite what I wanted.

A ghost story book, but not the sort I usually read, nor even quite the collections of real accounts I used to guzzle as a kid (and then get nervous about come nightfall). Yes, Gilbert, co-founder of The Banshee ('the leading journal for women who scream'), has collected assorted stories of supernatural sightings and uncanny encounters, but her intent is neither to convince us of their chilling truth, nor to debunk them. When it comes to veracity, I'd classify her position as the one so wisely advocated by Ken Campbell: you should never believe anything, but you can suppose everything. That's not the point of the exercise, though. This is an exercise in sociology as much as psychical research; persistent neighbourhood rumours and provably false local legends are as welcome as first-hand accounts, because regardless of your position on the survival of the soul or the stone tape theory, the popularity of the stories that imply them, presented as fact or something like it, is telling in and of itself, and can have real world impacts. I was particularly taken by the comparison with Kwasi Kwarteng's budget, which it's easy to forget, was ultimately never enacted – but for all that it ended up as only a scary story, has still had concrete effects far beyond any local gossip about that house where new buyers always seem to move on again suspiciously soon. Gilbert admits that part of the reason the book exists is simply that she wanted to find out more about her own local house of spooky repute, the one opposite the dentist, and as she explores various categories of spook, from white ladies to witches, her home region, England's North-East, remains at the forefront, though not without forays further afield – even to Naples in the chapter on subterranean spirits. A trip that's well worth it, because I was completely unaware of the city's intriguing 'little monks', the munacielli. Though that chapter did also feature the only point where I feel obliged to disagree with the book: discussing a particularly ominous byway of the Northern Line, Gilbert tells us that since 2021 "the majority of trains that would once have terminated at Kennington will continue instead through Nine Elms", a claim given the lie by quite how often I'm obliged to change from trains terminating at Kennington, the indicator boards in the centre of town suggesting that all those behind them have the same plan. Unless, I suppose, they're all phantom trains? Something to think about, there. Regardless, I enjoyed the novel perspective of a book interested less in literary merit or proof than in the ghost story as commonly experienced: "These are the spirits whispered about at primary schools and playgroups, at the hairdresser's and at the dentist's. We often don't know the origins of the stories, or who the spirits supposedly were in life. We rarely care. We only want to know what Mary's mother's auntie saw in the attic of that house that's been sold nine times in as many years."

(Netgalley ARC)

This book had a great plot with intriguing characters. I’ll definitely be looking out for more from this author.

Thank you #netgalley and #bonnierbooksuk for giving my access to the ARC of #Haunted.

“We all know the same ghosts: it's simply a question of how doggedly they haunt us.”

Part-chilling tale, part-memoir, part-cultural exploration, Haunted: Ghost Stories and Their Afterlives takes us through some of the most chilling and enduring ghost stories, and discusses what they reveal about the listener, the teller and the times we live in.

——————

I tend to read fiction over non-fiction but this one really grabbed my attention. I love a good ghost story but what makes this book extra special is the locations referenced within it. The stories are largely gathered from Newcastle and its surrounding areas, as well as other parts of the British Isles such as York.

The book is a good study of the supernatural and explores what that means to different people, catering to audiences of believers and nonbelievers alike.

If you’re looking for a little scare, a cosy read or have an interest in the history and psychology of the supernatural - this is the book for you.

Four ghosts from me.

👻👻👻👻

Thank you NetGalley for approving me for this book. A good read that I definitely enjoyed and am glad to have been able to read.

This isn’t just a book of ghost stories, it is also an exploration of their origins, what makes us fear (or not) ghosts, and how they become a part of local legend.
It looks at how people feel when they encounter a ghost or spirit and how, more often than not, we try to rationalise the unexplained.
Told with undoubted expertise of the subject, its an interesting exploration of the unknown.
I wanted to give this 3.5 stars as it's not a 4 but better than a 3

Let me start by saying that I am very much in the intended audience for this book. I adored Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country by Edward Parnell, I am interested in ghosts, I love a reflective memoir blended with history and/or cultural criticism and, like the author, I am a professional academic in a humanities field. I was so excited to be approved to review it. Sadly, it ended up being quite a disappointment.

The blurb sells it as a 'part-memoir, part cultural exploration', focusing on British ghost stories. I was hoping this would be to Northumbria/the North-East what Ghostland, marketed in a very similar way, was to East Anglia. Let's get some things out of the way - there is no element of 'memoir' to this book; although some stories focus on Northumbria, they are by far not the focus on the book and the 'culture' at the heart of the book is folklore, not popular and/or literary culture as expressed in films, novels, poems and on TV (which is fair enough, but it could have been made clearer in the marketing material). It is a book about the folklore of ghosts. This immediately puts it in quite a different publication category, armed with a much broader existing literature and a different set of comp books. Think A Natural History of Ghosts by Roger Clarke rather than whatever niche Olivia Laing carved for herself by blending musings with criticism. Within this context, Haunted does not work for three reasons: the main argument of the book is unconvincing, it is unclear what it adds to the extensive literature on ghosts and, most importantly, it is not actually focused on ghosts, as we meet witches, Banshees, faerie folk and other elements of broader British folklore.

Let's start with the main argument. Gilbert operates from the presumption that what interests people about ghosts is the personal experience of the contact. I paraphrase, but the gist of it is that we are interested in the person who met the ghost, what exactly they saw and heard, their experience of it, and not the story or even the identity of the ghost itself. This assumption is not supported by referencing any existing research or any substantial data the author collected. It is just stated as a fact. As someone with a lifelong fascination with ghosts, nothing could be further from the truth for me - I don't give a toss about our Jimmy seeing a ghost of a Blue Boy and how it affected him, I want to learn who the Blue Boy was, why they became a ghost and what drives them to still haunt the closet of their family home. Oh, but that's just your experience, you might say. Given that the author provided to evidence to the contrary, at this point it is their word against mine, and my word is more integral to my experience as a reader than the author's is.

This assumption drives the structure and the content of the book. The chapters are loosely connected by certain themes - familiar and intimate ghosts in the first chapter, the archetype of the White Lady in the second, witches and witchcraft in the third, ghosts below ground in the fourth, haunted properties and their value in the fifth and, VERY loosely, hauntings in professional and public setting in the sixth. Most of the chapters are structured around some sort of a balance between retellings of ghost stories collected by the author and her analysis of them and their context. The earlier chapters in particular are very heavy on the stories and very thin on analysis, which makes them functionally useless, as the author did not provide any information on her research methods or research questions. The chapters read like a collection of fire camp legends, with no context or specificity. It is not even 'my friend X told me XYZ', Gilbert might as well have made them all up herself. I do not expect a methods chapter and a literature review in a trade book, but some sort of an explanation of how her data was collected and why and how she intended to use it is sorely missing from the book. She operates from a premise that all the stories were real to the people who told them, which is a heck of a premise (there are lots of reasons as to why someone might want to share a ghost story which allegedly happened to them, none of which bar 'they believed the experience happened' are discussed by Gilbert).

What is the purpose of the book? To provide some raw data for future folklore research (in which case any researcher would need a bit more context than 'this story happened to Kate')? Or is this an anthropology trade book, exploring the world of people who believe in ghosts? In this case, Gilbert needed to drastically cut the (often very boring) stories themselves and provide much more analysis of why people believe certain things. She very rarely managed to achieve a balance between her own voice and the unnecessarily detailed stories - only Chapter 4 really managed to draw me in with its stories of Cornish miners and the London Underground. Even in that chapter, there are much better books on the hauntings of the Tube out there - what is this one adding?

This brings me to my last criticism - the lack of focus. The whole witchcraft chapter and theme seemed completely tacked onto a book about ghosts in an attempt to bulk it up and make the narrative more widely appealing beyond the 'ghost' crowd, pushing the book into the wider 'folklore' market via the 'witches are feminist' trope. The rest of the chapters also jump from topic to topic at the speed of light, never giving any of Gilbert's ideas, let alone the stories she collected, any space to breathe. Chapter 6, technically focused on the theme of 'public ghosts', was the most grievous offender in this respect. It felt like the author threw everything from the archetype of a haunted school swimming pool to the Stone Tape Theory at it to see what sticks (spoiler alert - none of it does).

What a disappointment in so many ways.

Thank you NetGalley and Bonnier Books Ltd for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I thought the memoir aspect of this appeal to me the least and I would read this title for the storytelling aspects, but, oh boy, was I wrong.
Gilbert’s writing style is captivating and as a sceptic, I enjoyed the blending of the memoir and the stories.
Spooky and witty.

This book is a nice mix of research, personal experiences and actual real-life stories. I really enjoyed the introduction which set up the scene, I got hooked on the first chapter and some of the ghost stories were genuinely creepy! I then got lost in the middle when the author begins to talk about witches and fairy folk, which I usually find interesting, but in the book screaming GHOSTS, I felt a bit confused. We then don't get ghosts and stories about spirits and phantoms until a few chapters later when the book picks up in the part about spooky happenings on the London Underground. It would've been a perfect book if the author stuck to the topic of ghosts - as the cover/title/synopsis suggests that's what it is - or if it was treated more like a spooky, folky stories book, if that makes sense. I did find it a bit longer and more repetitive than necessary, but overall did enjoy it and got creeped out by some of the real ghost stories recounted in the book.

I personally also very much enjoyed the comparison of Grey/White ladies to Gandalf ;)

Thanks very much NetGalley and Bonnier UK for this e-arc in exchange for my honest review.