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A Haunted History of Invisible Women
- True Stories of America's Ghosts
- Narrated by: Linda Jones
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
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Publisher's summary
Sorrowful widows, vengeful jezebels, innocent maidens, wronged lovers, former slaves, even the occasional axe-murderess—America's female ghosts differ widely in background, class, and circumstance. Yet one thing unites them: their ability to instill fascination and fear, long after their deaths. Here are the full stories behind some of the best-known among them, as well as the lesser-known—though no less powerful.
Tales whispered in darkness often divulge more about the teller than the subject. America's most famous female ghosts, from "Mrs. Spencer" who haunted Joan Rivers's New York apartment to Bridget Bishop, the first person executed during the Salem witchcraft trials, mirror each era's fears and prejudices. Yet through urban legends and campfire stories, even ghosts like the nameless hard-working women lost in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire achieve a measure of power and agency in death, in ways unavailable to them as living women.
Riveting for skeptics and believers alike, with humor, curiosity, and expertise, A Haunted History of Invisible Women offers a unique lens on the significant role these ghostly legends play both within the spook-seeking corners of our minds and in the consciousness of a nation.
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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Lady Killers
- Deadly Women Throughout History
- By: Tori Telfer
- Narrated by: Jaime Lamchick
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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When you think of serial killers throughout history, the names that come to mind are ones like Jack the Ripper, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy. But what about Tillie Klimek, Moulay Hassan, Kate Bender? The narrative we’re comfortable with is the one where women are the victims of violent crime, not the perpetrators. In fact, serial killers are thought to be so universally, overwhelmingly male that in 1998, FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood infamously declared in a homicide conference, “There are no female serial killers.”
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An ode to arsenic
- By 🔥 Phx17 🔥 on 03-04-24
By: Tori Telfer
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The Apparitionists
- A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost
- By: Peter Manseau
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.
By: Peter Manseau
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Nazi Literature in the Americas
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Eerie and fascinating
- By Jikai Zenshin on 03-19-21
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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American Witches
- A Broomstick Tour through Four Centuries
- By: Susan Fair
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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On a tour through history that's both whimsical and startling, we'll encounter 17th-century children flying around inside their New England home "like geese". We'll meet a father-son team of pious Puritans who embarked on a mission that involved undressing ladies and overseeing hangings. And on the eve of the Civil War, we'll accompany a reporter as he dons a dress and goes searching for witches in New York City's most dangerous neighborhoods.
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Christan witch book
- By Nicole on 09-01-20
By: Susan Fair
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Melville in Love
- The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick
- By: Michael Shelden
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Herman Melville's epic novel, Moby-Dick, was a spectacular failure when it was published in 1851, effectively ending its author's rise to literary fame. Because he was neglected by academics for so long, and because he made little effort to preserve his legacy, we know very little about Melville, and even less about what he called his "wicked book". Scholars still puzzle over what drove Melville to invent Captain Ahab's mad pursuit of the great white whale.
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intriguing
- By Jean on 06-18-16
By: Michael Shelden
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Survivor Cafe
- The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory
- By: Elizabeth Rosner
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Rosner
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Beyond preserving the firsthand testimonies of participants and witnesses, individuals and societies must continually take responsibility for learning the painful lessons of the past in order to offer hope for the future. Survivor Café offers a clear-eyed sense of the enormity of our 21st-century human inheritance - not only among direct descendants of the Holocaust, but also in the shape of our collective responsibility to learn from tragedy.
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A book every generation should read
- By J. Faught on 09-29-17
By: Elizabeth Rosner
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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
- Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
- By: Saidiya Hartman
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.
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Utterly beautiful!
- By L.A. on 12-27-19
By: Saidiya Hartman
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Ted Hughes
- The Unauthorized Life
- By: Jonathan Bate
- Narrated by: Mike Grady
- Length: 25 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Ted Hughes, poet laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron.
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Phenomenal thanks to narrator!
- By equinox14 on 06-26-16
By: Jonathan Bate
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My Thoughts Be Bloody
- The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth
- By: Nora Titone, Doris Kearns Goodwin - introduction/notes
- Narrated by: John B. Lloyd
- Length: 19 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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My Thoughts Be Bloody, a sweeping family saga, revives an extraordinary figure whose name has been missing, until now, from the story of President Lincoln's death. Edwin Booth, John Wilkes's older brother by four years, was in his day the biggest star of the American stage. Without an account of Edwin Booth, author Nora Titone argues, the real story of Lincoln's assassin has never been told.
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Wonderful!
- By Tad Davis on 11-30-10
By: Nora Titone, and others
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Romantic Outlaws
- The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley
- By: Charlotte Gordon
- Narrated by: Susan Lyons
- Length: 22 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Charlotte Gordon's new work is a fresh look at the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, who together comprise one of the most illustrious and inspiring mother-daughter pairs in history.
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Tons of info, poor format choice.
- By Gotta Tellya on 02-06-17
By: Charlotte Gordon
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Passing Strange
- A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
- By: Martha A. Sandweiss
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, best-selling author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War, Clarence King was named by John Hay "the best and brightest of his generation". But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for 13 years he lived a double life - as the celebrated White explorer, geologist, and writer Clarence King and as a Black Pullman porter and steelworker named James Todd.
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Race and Identity
- By Roy on 03-22-10
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What listeners say about A Haunted History of Invisible Women
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Olivia Main
- 10-30-24
Loved the angle on this!
Narrator was amazing, content was incredible. The way the stories were presented and the history behind them was refreshing. Stories I already knew about felt brand new!
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- Hall Ways
- 08-20-24
Learn the stories behind the stories
I was intrigued by this cover and title the first time I saw it, so I got a copy of A HAUNTED HISTORY OF INVISIBLE WOMEN back when it first published in 2022. I finally moved it from TBR to finished -- only took me two years!
To be clear: A HAUNTED HISTORY OF INVISIBLE WOMEN isn't a book of ghost stories so much as it is the history of the real women behind the ghost stories. The two authors alternate points of view and present readers/listeners with stories about a variety of famous, not-so-famous, and infamous women including maidens, witches, Jezebels, crones, mothers, wives, widows, and spinsters. Oh, and full out "bad girls."
They not only explore many of the commonly used tropes when it comes to ghost stories, they dive deeper. In pointing out that most ghost stories are about women, they then examine the truths behind the stories and point the lamplight on the suppression of and societal prejudices against women. By grouping together these stories, it's much easier to see what the tragic figures have in common and how that common thread is found in most ghost stories. And it left me thinking about how some groups profit from the tragedies of others.
While the true stories of the murders and deaths of the women are harrowing, this isn't a book that gave me spine tingling chills. The focus isn't on telling ghost stories but enlightening readers as to why they persist and pointing out discrepancies between the truth and the ghost story. It's much more an academic investigation than anything else, very well researched, and it was certainly a fresh approach and perspective I'd not considered.
ABOUT THE NARRATION: Narrator Linda Jones's delivery is even, but it was a bit slow for my enjoyment so I bumped to listening at 1.25x speed. Her voice fit well with the subject matter, and listening is much like hearing a speaker at a conference. However, there are more mispronunciations than there should be and too many misplaced pauses that took me out of the narration.
Interestingly enough, the authors are believers and have had their own ghostly encounters. Somehow, for me, that gives them more credibility when they debunked and denounced some in how they approached the book. Because of the amount on information that's shared, I think I'd like to have a print copy of this one in order to re-read some sections and utilize the bibliography and authors' notes I imagine are there (but weren't in the audiobook, which is the norm.)
I recommend this for readers who enjoy the stories behind the stories and for those who entertain the possibility of spirits who walk among us.
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- Anonymous User
- 01-31-23
Loved this audiobook
As a consumer of ghost literature, tours, and shows, I absolutely loved this well-researched and -argued book. So grateful to have stumbled upon this!
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2 people found this helpful
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- Every day user & wife
- 06-03-24
Excellent history hiding in ghost story form
the only complaint I have is the reader mispronounced a few place names, which is forgivable. I am looking forward to the sequel.
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- Stacee Jensen
- 07-22-24
Absolutely captivating
I AM OBSESSED. The story telling is just phenomenal I was hooked from the very beginning and finished too quickly!
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- Whitney L Jackson
- 10-17-22
Just right for a historical spooky read
Enjoyed this a lot... perfect read for October. the author's struck a good balance with history, skepticism, love of a good tale and touching on current feminist thinking without getting preachy.
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- Lisette
- 01-04-23
Women and their ghosts
A critical look at the women behind many of the ghost stories in America. The kindle version provides many references and footnotes to go with each section.
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1 person found this helpful