
A History of Ghosts
The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts and Ghostbusters
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Narrated by:
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Jeremy Gage
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Dan Aykroyd
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By:
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Peter H. Aykroyd
About this listen
Peter Aykroyd spent his childhood watching his family’s parlor séances through the crack of a basement door. Here, for the first time, Aykroyd tells the strange and delightful story that inspired his son, Dan, to make the mega-hit Ghostbusters.
Part history, part family legend, A History of Ghosts starts in 1848 in upstate New York, where the spiritualist craze first began. Aykroyd introduces the listener to notable mediums while telling the story of the development of spiritualism, interweaving a personal history marked by a fascination with ghosts and spirits with the larger narrative about the role the paranormal has played in our culture. Such legendary figures as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini appear - and vanish.
Everyone loves a good ghost story. Successful TV shows such as Medium and Ghost Hunters are proof that our national obsession with ghosts is here to stay. Millions of Americans believe in the paranormal—and even skeptics have heard a bump in the night and suspected it might be something supernatural.
©2009 Peter H. Aykroyd (P)2010 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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One of the best
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This is a great book!
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Overall
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Performance
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Life with the Afterlife
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Overall
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Performance
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This is a great book!
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Story
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í am rather disapointed
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They live in shadows - deep in the forest, late in the night, in the dark recesses of our minds. They're spoken of in stories and superstitions, relics of an unenlightened age, old wives' tales, passed down through generations. Yet no matter how wary and jaded we have become, as individuals or as a society, a part of us remains vulnerable to them: werewolves and wendigos, poltergeists and vampires, angry elves and vengeful spirits.
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Overall
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Performance
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Background music
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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Did not realize it was abridged
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The Witch of Lime Street
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The 1920s are famous as the golden age of jazz and glamour, but it was also an era of fevered yearning for communion with the spirit world, after the loss of tens of millions in the First World War and the Spanish-flu epidemic. A desperate search for reunion with dead loved ones precipitated a tidal wave of self-proclaimed psychics - and, as reputable media sought stories on occult phenomena, mediums became celebrities.
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Houdini, Conan Doyle and Marjorie
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the best-selling tradition of Rosemary Altea and John Edwards comes the memoir of Mary Ann Winkowski, the real life "Ghost Whisperer" and consultant on the Top 30 CBS show Ghost Whisperer starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. Lights flicker on and off for no good reason. You feel drained and inexplicably irritable. Your four-year-old is scared to enter her bedroom. Tell these things to Mary Ann Winkowski, and she'll tell you that you have a ghost. Mary Ann works with these spirits to help them make peace with what keeps them here.
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Love the subject, not the narrator
- By Kerri on 07-31-19
Critic reviews
Interesting research, but rather dry
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History of mediums
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Extremely interesting!
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Wonderful read that I could not put down.
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This book is a good history of the medium movement from someone who was there. I think this book treats the material very objectively and it's worth a read.
My only complaint with it is that this book does get boring in some parts.
Intersting history of the Seance movement
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Great, With a Bummer Ending
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OK book, not really what I expected.
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What it isn't:
About Ghostbusters. There's a bit in here about the movie, but don't expect an in-depth look at it.
Read by Dan Aykroyd. He wrote and reads an introduction. That is all.
A history of spiritualism from an academic standpoint.
What it is:
A brief history of the spiritualist movement and how it ties in to the Aykroyd family and, eventually, Ghostbusters. There was clearly a lot of academic research that went in to this book so we have a framework for spiritualism. There are much better books that offer a more extensive history on spiritualism, so look elsewhere if that's what you want. This book feels more personal because it comes from Aykroyd's real-life experiences, which I really enjoyed.
Listening to it can feel a little disjointed because it is riddled with info boxes and notes. It felt a little jarring at first, and certainly feels more natural in a paper book than an audio book. However, the reader clearly states when he will be reading one and it didn't take long to get used to it.
Many people seem to not like the narrator. I didn't have a problem with him, especially when I realized that he sounds a little like a less manic Edward Everett Horton.
All-in-all, not really a masterpiece, but certainly not bad. I enjoyed it a great deal.
odd and entertaining
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Wonderful Fun History Well Told
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lacking a little
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