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Haunted: The Ghosts That Share Our World
HERE - in 92,000 words, across 350-plus pages - eyewitnesses to the unknown describe their bizarre, and often terrifying brushes with ghosts.
Bestselling author JOHN PINKNEY has investigated several thousand hauntings - and this collection contains many of his most memorable cases.
Against a background of authentic photographs and artwork, Pinkney's unique book
* The chilling chronicle of the newsreader who died at the microphone - then haunted his radio station's corridors for the ensuing 25 years
* The 'asphalt apparitions' that haunt highways worldwide - prompting authorities in some countries to install warning signs
* The mansion owner who, after intense detective work, discovered her resident phantom's horrific secret
* The drowned man's face that invaded an official police photograph
* The angry poltergeist that startled a million TV viewers
* Telephone calls from the tsunami dead
And much more.
This acclaimed book is a comprehensive survey of modern hauntings - offering multiply-corroborated reports, analysis and photographs of supernatural events through the 20th and 21st centuries.
Bestselling author JOHN PINKNEY has investigated several thousand hauntings - and this collection contains many of his most memorable cases.
Against a background of authentic photographs and artwork, Pinkney's unique book
* The chilling chronicle of the newsreader who died at the microphone - then haunted his radio station's corridors for the ensuing 25 years
* The 'asphalt apparitions' that haunt highways worldwide - prompting authorities in some countries to install warning signs
* The mansion owner who, after intense detective work, discovered her resident phantom's horrific secret
* The drowned man's face that invaded an official police photograph
* The angry poltergeist that startled a million TV viewers
* Telephone calls from the tsunami dead
And much more.
This acclaimed book is a comprehensive survey of modern hauntings - offering multiply-corroborated reports, analysis and photographs of supernatural events through the 20th and 21st centuries.
- GenresParanormal
359 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 11, 2011
About the author
John Pinkney
34 books46 followersJOHN PINKNEY is a bestselling Australian author, screenwriter and journalist.
*His newest ebook is the novel Grave Injustice: An Afterlife Odyssey.
This dark, pacy science fiction thriller draws on John's career-long research into the paranormal - and the strange phenomena that may occur beyond the barriers of death.
Over the years, he has spoken to numerous people who clinically died and were then resuscitated - returning to describe landscapes and events of breathtaking beauty. The testimonies of these returnees from the brink inspired John to write Grave Injustice.
The narrative extends far beyond NDEs (near-death experiences.) It's set in Sydney and tropical Queensland; describing human love, courage and sacrifice, both earthly and transcendental.
Ranged against the young lovers are a corporate cell of scientifically accomplished soul-thieves,who draw their ideas from Dante's nine circles of Hell.
Terrifyingly, the novel portrays brutal conflict between good and evil. And it's hard, for a host of reasons, to predict which will prevail.
John Pinkney's other ebooks include Haunted: the Ghosts that Share Our World...Australia's Strangest Mysteries #1 and #2...A Paranormal File: An Australian Investigator's Casebook...The Mary Celeste Syndrome...Alien Airships Over Old America...Thirst: an Inheritance of Evil...The Girl Who Touched Infinity...The Key and the Fountain.
John's original screenplay Thirst, directed by Rod Hardy and produced by Anthony I. Ginnane won Best Horror
Film prize at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival. His 3-act drama, The Face in the Mirror, was co-awarded Best Stage Play in the General Motors/Elizabethan Theatre Trust competition.
He has written several hundred drama episodes for TV - and his paperbooks, including such titles as Great Australian Mysteries 1 & 2, Haunted, Unexplained and Unsolved have been numerously reprinted. His 3-volume Mazeworld series has appeared in USA and UK and in translation through Europe. His logic puzzle books Think!, Think Again! and Wordgames have also been published internationally.
For many years John was a prominent writer with Australia's Age newspaper, subsequently moving his column, Pinkney Place to Rupert Murdoch's national daily The Australian. Here he covered the century's most extraordinary UFO case: the disappearance without trace of young pilot Frederick Valentich, after radioing Flight Services that he was being 'orbited' by a gigantic craft. [full story and photographs are in A Paranormal File.]
John has had a lifelong interest in the unsolved and unexplained. His fascination with the unknown took its most practical form when, with lawyer-friend Peter Norris, he co-founded the organization known today as VUFORS - the Victorian UFO Research Society. John and Peter collaborated to host the weekly radio series The Truth Behind UFOs and Do You Believe in Ghosts?
Over the years John Pinkney's broadcasts and columns have attracted a large mail from listeners and readers describing their brushes with the bizarre. Readers of his books continue the input.
*His newest ebook is the novel Grave Injustice: An Afterlife Odyssey.
This dark, pacy science fiction thriller draws on John's career-long research into the paranormal - and the strange phenomena that may occur beyond the barriers of death.
Over the years, he has spoken to numerous people who clinically died and were then resuscitated - returning to describe landscapes and events of breathtaking beauty. The testimonies of these returnees from the brink inspired John to write Grave Injustice.
The narrative extends far beyond NDEs (near-death experiences.) It's set in Sydney and tropical Queensland; describing human love, courage and sacrifice, both earthly and transcendental.
Ranged against the young lovers are a corporate cell of scientifically accomplished soul-thieves,who draw their ideas from Dante's nine circles of Hell.
Terrifyingly, the novel portrays brutal conflict between good and evil. And it's hard, for a host of reasons, to predict which will prevail.
John Pinkney's other ebooks include Haunted: the Ghosts that Share Our World...Australia's Strangest Mysteries #1 and #2...A Paranormal File: An Australian Investigator's Casebook...The Mary Celeste Syndrome...Alien Airships Over Old America...Thirst: an Inheritance of Evil...The Girl Who Touched Infinity...The Key and the Fountain.
John's original screenplay Thirst, directed by Rod Hardy and produced by Anthony I. Ginnane won Best Horror
Film prize at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival. His 3-act drama, The Face in the Mirror, was co-awarded Best Stage Play in the General Motors/Elizabethan Theatre Trust competition.
He has written several hundred drama episodes for TV - and his paperbooks, including such titles as Great Australian Mysteries 1 & 2, Haunted, Unexplained and Unsolved have been numerously reprinted. His 3-volume Mazeworld series has appeared in USA and UK and in translation through Europe. His logic puzzle books Think!, Think Again! and Wordgames have also been published internationally.
For many years John was a prominent writer with Australia's Age newspaper, subsequently moving his column, Pinkney Place to Rupert Murdoch's national daily The Australian. Here he covered the century's most extraordinary UFO case: the disappearance without trace of young pilot Frederick Valentich, after radioing Flight Services that he was being 'orbited' by a gigantic craft. [full story and photographs are in A Paranormal File.]
John has had a lifelong interest in the unsolved and unexplained. His fascination with the unknown took its most practical form when, with lawyer-friend Peter Norris, he co-founded the organization known today as VUFORS - the Victorian UFO Research Society. John and Peter collaborated to host the weekly radio series The Truth Behind UFOs and Do You Believe in Ghosts?
Over the years John Pinkney's broadcasts and columns have attracted a large mail from listeners and readers describing their brushes with the bizarre. Readers of his books continue the input.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 22, 2014
You come away from this book having learned one major thing: Australia is absolutely teeming with ghosts.
This book, essentially a compilation of newspaper and radio reports, along with some first-person accounts of various ghost sightings and poltergeist-type experiences, is written in an objective, factual style. Not exactly gripping reading, but interesting nonetheless, and not the least because I've had a few paranormal experiences of my own.
Personal experience is why the topic of the supernatural fascinates me. I do NOT like or watch those hokey, scripted paranormal "investigation" shows on TV. The people who make those things should spend some time in one of the places where I lived for awhile -- a house with a bedroom so haunted that an out-of-town friend refused a return overnight visit after sleeping there once. Tee hee! Those were the days!
So I love the idea of ghosts, and because I haven't run into one in a couple of years, I had to read "Haunted." (Also, it was marked down to $4.99.) As I said, the great majority of the cases happened in Australia, and a handful in the UK, so the title is a tad misleading ("our world" being rather limited to one continent). There are a few photographs included, none of them very convincing.
If it weren't for Australia's large and venomous spiders, which scare me far more than any floating apparition would, I would use this book as a guide and go visit some of these sites myself.
This book, essentially a compilation of newspaper and radio reports, along with some first-person accounts of various ghost sightings and poltergeist-type experiences, is written in an objective, factual style. Not exactly gripping reading, but interesting nonetheless, and not the least because I've had a few paranormal experiences of my own.
Personal experience is why the topic of the supernatural fascinates me. I do NOT like or watch those hokey, scripted paranormal "investigation" shows on TV. The people who make those things should spend some time in one of the places where I lived for awhile -- a house with a bedroom so haunted that an out-of-town friend refused a return overnight visit after sleeping there once. Tee hee! Those were the days!
So I love the idea of ghosts, and because I haven't run into one in a couple of years, I had to read "Haunted." (Also, it was marked down to $4.99.) As I said, the great majority of the cases happened in Australia, and a handful in the UK, so the title is a tad misleading ("our world" being rather limited to one continent). There are a few photographs included, none of them very convincing.
If it weren't for Australia's large and venomous spiders, which scare me far more than any floating apparition would, I would use this book as a guide and go visit some of these sites myself.
May 3, 2016
If you find true paranormal accounts to be as truly captivating as yours truly, then John Pinkney's HAUNTED: The Ghosts That Share Our World is more than well worth a read. At more than 350 pages (at least 100 or more more than a whole lot of other ghost story collections out there - most of which will also most likely cost you a great deal more than Mr. Pinkney's ghostly collection), the book isn't just an excellent value; it's a real steal.
What's more, the author is a seasoned screenwriter and journalist who puts it all down for posterity with impeccable skill and clarity, and this particular book really shows it. Odds are, however, that you'll scarcely even pay John Pinkney much mind while sinking your very eye teeth into this well crafted volume of scary good stories. And that's as it should be, of course. Because thankfully, Mr. Pinkney doesn't impose himself all that much on his meticulously researched subject matter, the way a lot of authors in this genre tend to do, but rather, he sticks to the spooky facts, just as they've been set down throughout Australia's colorful (though often overlooked and highly underrated) history.
Which brings me to the other thing that I found so absolutely absorbing and frighteningly fascinating while reading Mr. Pinkney's collection of creepy tales from way down under. Australia! That's right, it's a true pleasure to dive into the captivating culture and hair raising history of the fantastic phantoms that have long haunted that most intriguing of southern hemispheric corners of the British Commonwealth. So even though North American readers may need to pause every now and then, and look up a few of the more definitively Oceanic-centric terms and nomenclature, believe me, it's more than well worth the time and effort. 'Cause Australia is just so doggone interesting, of course! And come on, rich Australian history + ghost stories! Who could possibly ask for more?
Make no mistake, this is a very well written and researched ghost story compendium, and Mr. Pinkney really should be highly commended for his studious and very objective treatment of this wonderfully intriguing subject matter. If, however, there is any shortcoming at all in this particular collection, I'd actually have to say that it may be that the book is... believe it or not, just a bit too long! And yet, I mentioned above that one of this book's strongest points is its considerable length.... Well, the flip side of that, unfortunately, is that after a while, all those marvelously scary details start to get just a bit overwhelming. Oh, here's another haunted mansion! Yet another roadside wraith! Oh dear! How to keep them all straight?
Don't get me wrong though. Despite its almost encyclopedic length, this is a GREAT BOOK, and I absolutely cannot help but highly recommend it to just about anyone. But, if I'd had my druthers (and I can hardly believe I'm even suggesting this, given the fact that I have, in the past, chided other authors in this particular genre for publishing far too many true paranormal themed books that were much too short, and therefore could have easily been combined into a single volume), but I really would have liked to have seen all this material broken up into at least two smaller collections. Oddly enough, it seems to me that that kind of editorial brevity would have actually helped this book out a great deal.
But who's complaining? Not me! I thoroughly enjoyed John Pinkney's 'Haunted,' and am now eager to read more works by this relatively unsung Australian author. To be sure, HAUNTED: The Ghosts That Share Our World is more than suitably chilling throughout. But more to the point, all the cases are fact based, and most have primarily occurred in and around Australia. What's more, the author really knocks this one out of the old ball park. And then some. And I'd say that that's a whole lot of good stuff for just one collection of good old fashioned ghost stories, wouldn't you?
What's more, the author is a seasoned screenwriter and journalist who puts it all down for posterity with impeccable skill and clarity, and this particular book really shows it. Odds are, however, that you'll scarcely even pay John Pinkney much mind while sinking your very eye teeth into this well crafted volume of scary good stories. And that's as it should be, of course. Because thankfully, Mr. Pinkney doesn't impose himself all that much on his meticulously researched subject matter, the way a lot of authors in this genre tend to do, but rather, he sticks to the spooky facts, just as they've been set down throughout Australia's colorful (though often overlooked and highly underrated) history.
Which brings me to the other thing that I found so absolutely absorbing and frighteningly fascinating while reading Mr. Pinkney's collection of creepy tales from way down under. Australia! That's right, it's a true pleasure to dive into the captivating culture and hair raising history of the fantastic phantoms that have long haunted that most intriguing of southern hemispheric corners of the British Commonwealth. So even though North American readers may need to pause every now and then, and look up a few of the more definitively Oceanic-centric terms and nomenclature, believe me, it's more than well worth the time and effort. 'Cause Australia is just so doggone interesting, of course! And come on, rich Australian history + ghost stories! Who could possibly ask for more?
Make no mistake, this is a very well written and researched ghost story compendium, and Mr. Pinkney really should be highly commended for his studious and very objective treatment of this wonderfully intriguing subject matter. If, however, there is any shortcoming at all in this particular collection, I'd actually have to say that it may be that the book is... believe it or not, just a bit too long! And yet, I mentioned above that one of this book's strongest points is its considerable length.... Well, the flip side of that, unfortunately, is that after a while, all those marvelously scary details start to get just a bit overwhelming. Oh, here's another haunted mansion! Yet another roadside wraith! Oh dear! How to keep them all straight?
Don't get me wrong though. Despite its almost encyclopedic length, this is a GREAT BOOK, and I absolutely cannot help but highly recommend it to just about anyone. But, if I'd had my druthers (and I can hardly believe I'm even suggesting this, given the fact that I have, in the past, chided other authors in this particular genre for publishing far too many true paranormal themed books that were much too short, and therefore could have easily been combined into a single volume), but I really would have liked to have seen all this material broken up into at least two smaller collections. Oddly enough, it seems to me that that kind of editorial brevity would have actually helped this book out a great deal.
But who's complaining? Not me! I thoroughly enjoyed John Pinkney's 'Haunted,' and am now eager to read more works by this relatively unsung Australian author. To be sure, HAUNTED: The Ghosts That Share Our World is more than suitably chilling throughout. But more to the point, all the cases are fact based, and most have primarily occurred in and around Australia. What's more, the author really knocks this one out of the old ball park. And then some. And I'd say that that's a whole lot of good stuff for just one collection of good old fashioned ghost stories, wouldn't you?
May 16, 2016
Fascinating body of work
I loved this work from Mr. Pinkney. This is not the first of his books that I have read but so far it's my favorite. The topics are divided between the type of ghostly experience and makes for a great read as a research volume also. Just buy it and read it, very well worth the time and money. Well researched and written the author let's the voices of the contributors come through so as to read more like a gathering of friends discussing the subject. Thank you, Mr. Pinkney for several days of enjoyment.
I loved this work from Mr. Pinkney. This is not the first of his books that I have read but so far it's my favorite. The topics are divided between the type of ghostly experience and makes for a great read as a research volume also. Just buy it and read it, very well worth the time and money. Well researched and written the author let's the voices of the contributors come through so as to read more like a gathering of friends discussing the subject. Thank you, Mr. Pinkney for several days of enjoyment.
March 26, 2018
Much enjoyed
Was much better than expected from the other reviews on this book. You have to get used to the English spelling vs American spelling and terms. The stories from Australia were interesting and most were new to me.
Was much better than expected from the other reviews on this book. You have to get used to the English spelling vs American spelling and terms. The stories from Australia were interesting and most were new to me.
March 28, 2025
Retelling of ghost sightings and hauntings made interesting reading throughout this book.
October 28, 2015
Spooky true ghost tales
I liked the book. It was a lot of very good ghost tales that got right to the point. Fun to read in the dark.
I liked the book. It was a lot of very good ghost tales that got right to the point. Fun to read in the dark.
March 20, 2016
Very Well Written
This has been the best and most interesting book of ghost stories that I have ever read! I won't even finish most ghost books!
This has been the best and most interesting book of ghost stories that I have ever read! I won't even finish most ghost books!
March 28, 2016
very nice mix
I loved the energy put I into each story. it wasnt just one similar story following another. each had its own voice and flavor!!
I loved the energy put I into each story. it wasnt just one similar story following another. each had its own voice and flavor!!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews