Haunted Houses Ghosts & Spectres (Usborne Supernatural Guides, 1979)

One of the more popular posts on this blog is my coverage of 1977's All About Ghosts from Usborne Publishing's World of the Unknown series. I guess there are a lot of folks out there like me who were captivated by this series as a kid after having checked it our repeatedly from the school library.

Usborne followed that up in 1979 with Haunted Houses, Ghosts & Spectres, part of a new series of Supernatural Guides (the other titles were Vampires, Werewolves & Demons and Mysterious Powers & Strange Forces. All three volumes were compiled in a fourth book, Usborne Guide to the Supernatural World, and like the World of the Unknown series, they were all reprinted in the early 90s with new cover art but identical content.)




This is a much smaller sized publication than the World of the Unknown books, and is labeled an "Usborne Pocketbook", because it is tiny enough to fit in your pocket... well, that is if you wear clothes with freakishly large 7" x 4.5" pockets!

And don't assume as I did that this book is merely a Cliff Notes digest version of All About Ghosts . Its actually all new material, illustrations and all. Here are some samples of what you'll find within.



Before we can delve into the world of supernatural hauntings we need to agree on terms. What exactly is a haunted house, anyway?



Don't leave out the haunted castles!



Different types of ghosts are described and defined.



Everyone knows the best ghosts are missing their heads, and this book has a whole spread devoted to them!









In a story reminiscent of The Golden Arm, a ghost returns to retrieve a ring that was stolen from her corpse.



The Lord Dufferin story, in which a ghostly premonition warns "Room for one more!" is covered here but for some reason the author chose to leave out the signature quote from this telling. (This famous ghost story was also covered in the Scholastic classic Strangely Enough by C.B. Colby!)



Did somebody say poltergeist?



The Usborne Supernatural Guides are out of print, but can be found on the second-hand market for reasonable prices.

The Hounds of Death (Ghosts-The Eerie Series, Seymour Simon, 1976)

Before my 5th grade conversion to junior skeptic under the influence of James "the Amazing" Randi, I was a believer in all things supernatural, so sought out ghost stories not only from the imagination (The Thing at the Foot of the Bed [Maria Leach], Tales of Terror [Ida Chittum], etc.) but from the non-fiction section of the library as well.

I was spellbound by books like Usborne Publishing's All About Ghosts, which documents real-life encounters with the spirit world, and I'll include the fictionalized novel of the allegedly true haunting known as The Amityville Horror in that category as well (a book, incidentally, that I was forbidden to read because it was deemed too adult, so kept a hidden copy stashed in my 2nd grade desk.)

One haunting encounter I'd read that struck me as uniquely unusual and scary is that of a ghost dog, hovering outside an upper-floor window of a house, and missing its head! That image stuck with me into adulthood, but I'd long forgotten the source.

Gotta love those ex-library copies!

Thanks goes (again) to Kindertrauma for turning me in the right direction. The account, as it turns out, comes from the book Ghosts (1976, Seymour Simon, black and white illustrations by Stephen Grammell), part of "The Eerie Series" of supernatural non-fiction children's books. In nine chapters, Ghosts relays stories of real-life hauntings, as well as a few fictional tales from literature and legend.

It was in Chapter 8, The Hounds of Death, where I'd read about various encounters with ghostly dogs, including one that haunted a woman in Norfolk. Disturbed by the sound of scratching on her upper floor windowpane, the woman gets out of bed to find, "pressed against the glass...the huge form of a shaggy dog without a head."

Another chapter, The Noisy Ghosts of Calvados Castle, is about a French castle where frightening screams, moans, and long shrieks have been heard as far back as 1875.

The Nameless Horror of Berkeley Square is an "unspeakably horrible" ghost with many legs and tentacles and only a round hole for a mouth, that, in the late 1890s, came out of London's ancient sewers to haunt a townhouse.

Chapter 3, A Long Island Spirit, is a more humorous than horrifying account from 1958 of a playful poltergeist that had been knocking over soda and perfume bottles in the Long Island home of James Herrmann.

The stories turn more disturbing in The Restless Coffins, about a family crypt in Barbados where the coffins, several of them children's, are repeatedly found displaced and stacked in unaccountable ways.

The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall is about a ghost that had been haunting Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England, since 1835, and was allegedly captured on film by a photographer in 1936.

In Chapter 6, The Ghostly Hitchhikers, we move into the realm of urban legend with two variations of the classic hitchhiker campfire tale.

Ghost ships and sea haunts are covered in Chapter 7, The S.S. Watertown Phantoms, while Chapter 9, Haunted American History, takes us to the realm of early-American literature and legend, from White House hauntings to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.


Ghosts-The Eerie Series can be had cheap on the used market.

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark with original Stephen Gammell illustrations is back!

Hot on the heels of the surprising news that Usborne Publishing's World of the Unknown: All About Ghosts book was returning to print in a facsimile edition, I am pleased to discover that Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark trilogy has been rereleased with the original Stephen Gammell artwork restored!

You may recall back in 2012 Gammell's soul-scarring black and white illustrations had been replaced with new art by Brett Helquist done in a completely different style, which I described in a previous post as "the labor of a competent and perfectly sane artist."

I'm guessing we can thank the new Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark feature film, directed by André Øvredal (Troll Hunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe) and produced by Guillermo Del Toro (everything cool) for invigorating interest in the title, as the film faithfully adapts Gammell's original designs in three horrifying dimensions.

Order at Amazon.

Make This Model Haunted House (1991)

From Usborne Publishing, the same folks that, back in the 1970s, brought us the World of the Unknown Series (I previously posted on All About Ghosts and All About Monsters) comes Make This Model Haunted House (1991), a cut-out and construct paper model.

The artwork by Iain Ashman is terrific. Here are some of the elements:



The finished house (per the rear cover photograph) should look like so:

All About Ghosts (1977, Maynard)

All About Ghosts (1977, Maynard, Usborne Publishing), one of three books in the World of the Unknown series (I previously posted on All About Monsters). A slim (32 pages), but well-illustrated look at a variety of topics relating to ghosts, from traditional spirits that appear in folklore and literature, to supposed real-life hauntings from the modern era, and even known ghost-hoax methods.



Here's an illustration of the Pepper's Ghost effect...a centuries old illusion using reflections on a large pane of glass. The effect can be viewed today in the ballroom section of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion.

I always liked this 2-page spread detailing all the elements you might expect to encounter in an actual haunted house. With the numbered pictures spread across the house exterior, it resembles some kind of haunted house board game. Oops! I landed on the screaming skull (7)...lose a turn!

Here are details of all the haunted encounters:

The book was republished in 1999 by Tiger Books International with a new cover (the interior pages are identical to the original 1977 edition).