Every page in this little book is beautifully composed, but Gallagher never leaves us doubting how much she still misses Sonnenberg. They are the celebrity gossip of history, the salacious underbelly of the past, and we’re drawn to them because the standard history often obscures as much as it reveals.

He was indeed written out of Seabury’s final will, mainly due to debts he’d incurred in the wake of the Civil War (Seabury instead left a trust in Samuel’s daughter’s name).

Examining our country’s local ghost stories—where they came from, how they’ve evolved, how they’re recounted—may tell us a great deal about things we thought were long settled and in the past. A visitor to the house in the summer of 1995 claimed that while upstairs she had a lengthy conversation with an older gentleman in a tattered suit and a heavy wool jacket smelling of mothballs, who talked to her of what the house was like to live in. By exposing historical inaccuracies and sociological calumny, the work treats readers to a better understanding of the socioeconomic and political milieu in which these myths gained acceptance, ultimately providing a richer, more nuanced narrative. Still, one never forgets that this isn’t just a Michelin guide to the eerie sites that inspired various supernatural classics. It's a book I found difficult to put down, a book that in several places made me sob, not only for the author's own losses, but for how my own chimed so much with his, and a book that sent me down many hours of enjoyable rabbit holes where I chased long forgotten tv series, plays, short stories, and novels.

On one level a delightful ramble through the dark and esoteric influences on children of the 70s and 80s and their enduring legacy on those of us who remain inclined to the darker side of life. Ghostland is a not-spooky, but thoroughly entertaining, examination of ghost stories and haunted locales throughout America with the express intent of debunking the paranormal and better understanding how ghost stories reflect on our past and present. It feels cathartic; Parnell’s longing for ‘reconciliation with the ghosts of the past’ we hope fulfilled.Over time, she focused her energies on keeping the house exactly as Seabury intended it, maintaining its nineteenth century charm until she died, at the age of ninety-three, in 1933. Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936), famous for so many novels and stories, has his ghostly tale “They” from TRAFFICS AND DISCOVERIES (1905), singled out for its beautiful writing “about the enclaves of the Sussex countryside. Once they got to the final house, it was just a little confusing with the holograms and left me feeling like I had missed something.