true haunting experiences

  • Easter Monday

    Easter Monday

    The 1949 St. Louis exorcism is one of the most documented and debated cases of possession in American history. It is the case that inspired The Exorcist, but most of what people think they know comes from film, not from the actual accounts. When you go back to Father Bishop’s diary and read what was…

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  • A Haunting Disease

    A Haunting Disease

    I heard a quote once that described a haunted house as one that had gone insane. That made a strange kind of sense to me. The idea that a house could harbor something hidden inside it, a kind of internal system that carries something through its walls and floors like a disease. That is what…

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  • Bookends

    Bookends

    Every once in a while I stop and look at two books sitting on my shelf. The Uninvited and The Architecture of Shadows. They were written many years apart, but in a strange way they belong to the same story. The Uninvited was the beginning of everything for me. It tells the story of what…

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  • Haunted Lives, Deserving Humility

    There is something I have been watching happen again and again in paranormal spaces, and it worries me more now than it ever did before. It is not the unexplained that concerns me. It is what people do to one another in the name of explaining it. When people reach out for help, they are…

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  • A Conversation: Zombie Road

    A Conversation: Zombie Road

    Zombie Road: Between the Living and the Lost Q: You open Zombie Road by saying this is not rumor or folklore meant to scare. Why was that important to state right away? Because fear is easy. Anyone can frighten. What interested me was what lingers. Zombie Road carries history, loss, and repetition. The stories did…

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  • A Season for Ghosts

    A Season for Ghosts

    I often think of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol when I think about ghosts this time of year. December has always felt like the most haunted month to me. Not because it is frightening, but because it brings the past closer. Dickens understood that. He tapped into something deeply human when he wrapped a ghost story…

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  • This photo shows Keith Gregory in makeup for A Haunting: Fear House. It’s from the one scene that people always seem to remember. The truth is, I had a very hard time with how that scene was presented. On screen it came across almost like a moment from IT, a full-on horror clown. But that…

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