Here are 80 books that Haunted Halls fans have personally recommended if you like
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I find the archaeology of here to be just as interesting and enlightening as any faraway land. For those of us at universities, that means that the campus itself is worthy of historical, archaeological, and anthropological study. I have been San Diego State’s University History Curator for decades and never tire of uncovering new insights into an institution with a 125-year history, nearly 500,000 alumni, and a bevy of bizarre tales. Whether it be hidden student murals, supernatural claims from the gridiron, or disputed dinosaur footprints, the immediate landscape of our workplace is often full of historical treasures.
Campus Traditions is a complete study of college culture that spans centuries and all of the United States. It is thorough, entertaining, and presents a clear evolution of post-secondary education from old-time colleges to today’s mega-university. Professors and students from all fields will recognize their university in this book and marvel at traditions that were thought to have been unique to their school but are, in fact, part of a much greater national trend.
From their beginnings, campuses emerged as hotbeds of traditions and folklore. American college students inhabit a culture with its own slang, stories, humor, beliefs, rituals, and pranks. Simon J. Bronner takes a long, engaging look at American campus life and how it is shaped by students and at the same time shapes the values of all who pass through it. The archetypes of absent-minded profs, fumbling jocks, and curve-setting dweebs are the stuff of legend and humor, along with the all-nighters, tailgating parties, and initiations that mark campus tradition--and student identities. Undergraduates in their hallowed halls embrace distinctive traditions because…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I find the archaeology of here to be just as interesting and enlightening as any faraway land. For those of us at universities, that means that the campus itself is worthy of historical, archaeological, and anthropological study. I have been San Diego State’s University History Curator for decades and never tire of uncovering new insights into an institution with a 125-year history, nearly 500,000 alumni, and a bevy of bizarre tales. Whether it be hidden student murals, supernatural claims from the gridiron, or disputed dinosaur footprints, the immediate landscape of our workplace is often full of historical treasures.
Whereas many books research the history of higher education are full of lofty ideals and collegiate high jinks, Alan Taylor’s book Thomas Jefferson’s Education is an insightful yet sobering look at the historical context and inception of the University of Virginia. This text is no hagiography and details how Jefferson’s university was deeply intertwined with slavery and many of the elitist vices common to Virginia gentry.
By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully crafted history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. Thomas Jefferson shares centre stage with his family and fellow planters, all dependent on the labour of enslaved black families. With a declining Virginia yielding to commercially vibrant northern states, in 1819 Jefferson proposed to build a university to educate and improve the sons of the planter elite. He hoped they might one day lead a revitalised Virginia free of slavery-and free of the former slaves.
Jefferson's campaign was a contest for the future of a state…
I find the archaeology of here to be just as interesting and enlightening as any faraway land. For those of us at universities, that means that the campus itself is worthy of historical, archaeological, and anthropological study. I have been San Diego State’s University History Curator for decades and never tire of uncovering new insights into an institution with a 125-year history, nearly 500,000 alumni, and a bevy of bizarre tales. Whether it be hidden student murals, supernatural claims from the gridiron, or disputed dinosaur footprints, the immediate landscape of our workplace is often full of historical treasures.
Anne Gardiner Perkins’ Yale Needs Women combines rigorous historical research and riveting storytelling to produce a book that is both insightful and inspirational. She explains how Yale University’s first female students in 1969 faced extensive discrimination and had to fight rampant misogyny, outdated traditions, and backwards views on a daily basis to get an education.
WINNER OF THE 2020 CONNECTICUT BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION AND NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS FOR BOOK CLUBS IN 2021 BY BOOKBROWSE "Perkins' richly detailed narrative is a reminder that gender equity has never come easily, but instead if borne from the exertions of those who precede us."-Nathalia Holt, New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls If Yale was going to keep its standing as one of the top two or three colleges in the nation, the availability of women was an amenity it could no longer do without. In the winter of 1969, from…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
I find the archaeology of here to be just as interesting and enlightening as any faraway land. For those of us at universities, that means that the campus itself is worthy of historical, archaeological, and anthropological study. I have been San Diego State’s University History Curator for decades and never tire of uncovering new insights into an institution with a 125-year history, nearly 500,000 alumni, and a bevy of bizarre tales. Whether it be hidden student murals, supernatural claims from the gridiron, or disputed dinosaur footprints, the immediate landscape of our workplace is often full of historical treasures.
Laurie Wilkie uses multiple lines of evidence, including recently uncovered archaeological artifacts, oral histories, old photographs, and the campus landscape, to examine daily life at UC Berkeley’s first fraternity. Her intriguing study offers insights into the notion of the early modern university as well as changing definitions of masculinity during the early 20th century.
"The Lost Boys of Zeta Psi" takes us inside the secret, amusing, and sometimes mundane world of a California fraternity around 1900. Gleaning history from recent archaeological excavations and from such intriguing sources as oral histories, architecture, and photographs, Laurie A. Wilkie uncovers details of everyday life in the first fraternity at the University of California, Berkeley, and sets this story into the rich social and historical context of West Coast America at the turn of the last century. In particular, Wilkie examines men's coming-of-age experiences in a period when gender roles and relations were undergoing dramatic changes. Her innovative…
I am a multi-award-winning African Australian writer, and have a deep passion for stories by people of colour, stories that engage with difference. I write across genres and forms, and my award-winning works are mostly Afrocentric. I am especially curious about unique voices in black speculative fiction in transformative stories of culture, diversity, climate change, writing the other, and betwixt.
This book brings together a diverse cast of writers from Africa and the diaspora to explore spirits, ancestors, and folklore in eerie ghost stories from Africa.
It spotlights new, contemporary, and award-winning writers in their study of ancestral fear or veneration, and retellings or new craftings of gothic horror.
Following the hugely successful Black Sci-Fi Short Stories and Asian Ghost Short Stories, comes this deluxe edition of new African writing and tales rooted in ancient culture. This collection explores the deep-seated supernatural element in African storytelling - whether reaching back to the spirits, ancestors and ogres of folklore or the vibrantly modern ghosts of today's African horror. New and contemporary stories complement poignant folktales such as 'The Story of Takane' from Lesotho and 'The Disobedient Daughter Who Married a Skull' from Nigeria.
With a foreword by award-winning Nigerian-British writer Nuzo Onoh, an introduction by Prof. Divine Che Neba,…
My interest in ghosts is partly due to growing up in York, which is one of the most haunted cities in the UK. In that city, I think that pretty much every pub has its own ghost, and if you’re unlucky (or lucky) enough, you stand a good chance of spotting long-dead Roman soldiers, plague victims, or ghostly dogs as you walk the streets. This atmosphere has seeped into my fiction; I have written two novels of the supernatural and am currently working on a third. I’ve also made a study of the grim and gothic in fiction; my Ph.D. thesis was largely about vampires (especially Dracula) but also strayed into other monsters and uncanny stories over the past two centuries.
Oscar Wilde gave us a genuinely chilling gothic tale in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but in this short story, the supernatural is a source of fun.
The Otis family, pleasant, sensible, and up-to-date Americans, move into a haunted English manor and immediately antagonize Sir Simon de Canterville, the house’s resident spectre. Sir Simon has a theatrical flair for haunting, pulling out all the stops to terrify his victims into gibbering wrecks, but it’s all wasted on the Otis family, who are hilariously unbothered by the spookiness.
If you’re staying in a haunted house, I highly recommend channeling your inner Otis.
Despite warnings from Lord Canterville that their new home is haunted and that several family have fled form it in the middle of the night the Otis family chooses to go forward with their relocation. Almost immediately the Otis Family discovers that the stories are true and that their house is haunted by the ghost of Sir Simon. It is Sir Simon's intent not to share the house with anyone, but the Otis family is not like previous families that Sir Simon has scared off in the past. Narrated by the ghost himself, this Gothic ghost story takes the reader…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
I grew up listening to my family’s "true" ghost stories, each creepy tale ending with a declaration that "there are no such things as ghosts." As a teenager, I devoured books of folklore, with all their tales of ghosts, witches, and long-legetty beasties: and also many books about paranormal research. As an adult, I’m a complete unbeliever but still very fond of both reading and writing ghost stories!
I once made the mistake of reading several of James’ ghost stories, one after another, while alone in the house.
I was making a cup of coffee when something started scratching stealthily at the inside of a cupboard door. I had to lower myself from the ceiling before I discovered that some scrunched carrier bags hung inside the cupboard had unscrunched, causing the ghostly scratching. But that’s why I love James’ ghost stories.
The second in a series of republished classic literature, The Ghost Stories of M. R. James collects the tales that best illustrate his quiet mastery of the ghost story form. Running through each of these stories is a slowly escalating sense of unease and dread, which ultimately shifts into the wildly uncanny. James' characters exist in a world of ancient objects whose atrocious histories begin to repeat when they are disturbed, and the blinkered repression common to James' narratives only amplifies the shock of the spectral appearance.
I went to university wanting to become a Roman specialist, but ended up going backwards in time until I landed with a bump on the hard flints of the Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age). I research aspects of the behaviour of the Pleistocene (Ice Age) indigenous Europeans – the Neanderthals – and the origins and evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens. I undertake fieldwork across Europe, and I’m particularly interested in the origins and early development of art – both on portable objects and cave walls – and the long-term evolution of our treatment of the dead. My scientific love is how we can try to get inside the mind of our most remote ancestors.
As a specialist in the funerary practices of our earliest ancestors, I avidly awaited the publication of Finkel’s latest, this time deploying his considerable scholarship to the question of how Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians thought of ghosts, spirits, demons, and the underworld.
You don’t need to be a believer to enjoy this intimate picture of the minds of some of the earliest known urbanites and intellectuals at a time when history was just emerging. Out of the fired clay leap stories of underworld journeys such as that of Gilgamesh, of spirits that rise up from below, of exorcisms, omens, and the shadows that lurk in the corners of the house.
To me, this is the most profound statement on early humans at their most imaginative, and if you believe it a useful manual for the prospective ghost hunter.
'It's enthralling stuff, mixing the scholarly with the accessible and placing storytelling right at the heart of the human experience.' - History Revealed
'A fascinating journey' - Yorkshire Post
'The book is a delight to read: each chapter is as academically astute as you would expect from this author, but delivered with a light touch and entertaining writing-style that sweeps the reader through the pages.' - Archaeology Worldwide
In The First Ghosts, he has found the perfect medium for bringing the ancient Mesopotamians back from the dead... Despite the morbid theme and remote cultural milieu, this is not a sombre…
During Covid, I gave myself the Story-a-Month Challenge. I started a story on the first day of each month and stopped on the last day. A subconscious theme emerged: the struggles of grown people and their parents, done fantastically. By year’s end, I had twelve stories, placed in magazines somewhere. I collected them, adding earlier stories, longer and with younger protagonists, but with the same theme of arrested development. I called the book “Adult Children,” a wry reference to offspring of alcoholics (I am one). Also subconscious: my inspiration from other authors of fantastical collections, some of whom I’ve included here.
These days, “folk horror” is a popular term for movies like Midsommer and The Witch.
In the early twentieth century, M. R. James is said to have invented this genre and revitalized the ghost story as a form. His memorably unsettling work often involves academics, scholars, and researchers confronting an uncanny, bucolic world.
The most renowned stories in this collection include “Casting the Runes” (a reviewer of an occult book learns an earlier critic died mysteriously), “The Mezzotint” (an upsetting engraving changes each time a curator looks at it), and “Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (a professor dubious of the existence of ghosts fatefully finds an ancient whistle on vacation).
When we think of ghost stories, we tend to think of cub scouts cringing by a fire, s'mores at the ready, as some aging camp counselor tries to scare them witless with yet another tale from the crypt. But as Michael Chabon's marvelous introduction reminds us, the ghost story was once integral to the genre of the short story. Indeed, as he points out, it can be argued that the ghost story was the genre. Dickens's "A Christmas Carol," Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw"-most of the early short story writers wrote ghost stories as a matter of course.…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’m a writer of sapphic horror and romance fiction, and a professor of nineteenth and twentieth literature and Women’s and Gender Studies. I’ve been an avid reader of ghost-focused fiction since I was a little kid. This fascination was, in part, encouraged by my horror-loving parents, but I think I’ve just always loved being scared, and for me, the scariest thing imaginable is a haunted house. I’ve read widely in the genre, by turns spooked, thrilled, and baffled, and this reading eventually encouraged me to write my own haunted house novels. If you love a chilling tale, you’re going to love the books on this list.
While there are haunted house-like novels before James’s 1898 classic, this in many ways is a granddaddy of modern haunted tales. An isolated country estate? Check. A creepy housekeeper? Check. Two even creepier children, possibly possessed? Check, check! When the unnamed narrator is hired as the new governess in a remote country home in England, she arrives to find that her two young wards are already nearly corrupted by the ghosts of the former governess and groundskeeper. As she works to save them, the narrator herself is threatened, both by the ghosts and by the children she’s meant to save. The psychological possibilities of this book, however, linger at the edges of the text, threatening to undermine the whole notion of what this haunting really is.
A young, inexperienced governess is charged with the care of Miles and Flora, two small children abandoned by their uncle at his grand country house. She sees the figure of an unknown man on the tower and his face at the window. It is Peter Quint, the master's dissolute valet, and he has come for little Miles. But Peter Quint is dead.
Like the other tales collected here - `Sir Edmund Orme', `Owen Wingrave', and `The Friends of the Friends' - `The Turn of the Screw' is to all immediate appearances a ghost story. But are the appearances what…
