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True Ghost Stories: Authentic ghosts, hauntings and paranormal experiences from around the world. Book One
True Ghost Stories is a book filled with thrilling tales of real life connections with ghosts, paranormal activity and unexplained phenomenon.
Stuart Cumberland shares first-hand stories from his experiences as a paranormal investigator and other spooky tales from first-hand accounts or verified true. Stories that will chill you, inspire you, and thrill you.
What happens when a seance goes wrong? (You may never use a spirit talking board after this)Can a murdered woman have revenge on her murderer? (A ghost actually testifies at trial)How far will a dead mother go save her living child? (Multiple reputable witnesses experience ghostly encounters)And Some of these stories will keep you awake at night... you might want to leave on a light!
Pleasant dreams. Or nightmares. Whichever you prefer! The answers are in this Kindle short read of 12K words. Scroll up and order your copy today.
Stuart Cumberland shares first-hand stories from his experiences as a paranormal investigator and other spooky tales from first-hand accounts or verified true. Stories that will chill you, inspire you, and thrill you.
What happens when a seance goes wrong? (You may never use a spirit talking board after this)Can a murdered woman have revenge on her murderer? (A ghost actually testifies at trial)How far will a dead mother go save her living child? (Multiple reputable witnesses experience ghostly encounters)And Some of these stories will keep you awake at night... you might want to leave on a light!
Pleasant dreams. Or nightmares. Whichever you prefer! The answers are in this Kindle short read of 12K words. Scroll up and order your copy today.
52 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 30, 2016
25 people are currently reading
23 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 25, 2016
It's a good thing that Stuart Cumberland's thoughtful compendium of paranormal tales is written better than the usual, skinny little, e-published, clone-titled "True Ghost Stories" collection! To be sure, the prose, though certainly not flawless, is, in most respects, quite well composed. The author is frequently personable, charming, and in many instances, even rather witty. In fact, the only thing that kept me from giving this one a full five star rating was that the last couple of stories in the book were not really penned by the author himself.
But then, that's not necessarily a bad thing, is it? A great many of the similarly titled "True Ghost Stories" collections cluttering up the true paranormal market these days are mostly comprised of accounts that the publishing author had little or nothing to do with - other than that he or she obviously felt the need to include the material in his or her manuscript for whatever reason. So what left me feeling decidedly less enthusiastic about the book by the time I'd reached the end (as opposed to the beginning, when I initially felt very gratified to be reading a ghost story collection that at first seemed much better than the average) was that the strength (and most significantly, the scariness factor) of the stories seemed to decrease somewhat by the time the book had come to a close.
Bummer.
Not to give too much away, but the last story in the book (which isn't even the last chapter - the copyright information is actually listed as the last chapter, believe it or not!), was originally written by Sidney Dickenson in 1920, and entitled True Tales Of The Weird. Which would all be fine and dandy if that last story was actually much more than just... well, weird. Because it certainly isn't all that scary. It's an inexplicable true tale, to be sure, but it's not particularly frightening or even all that coherent. Nor does it seem to harmonize in any significant way with any of the previous chapters in the book. In fact, the darned story bugged and puzzled me so much, I had to go back and reread it a couple more times, just to figure out what was so blasted annoying about it.
So even though I really must reiterate that the author did do a better job (at least at the beginning) than the average ghost story collection writer, for me, the material had very much been drained of its original vitality by the bitter end. Okay, well, there's obviously a second volume by the same author that's already available, so it seems painfully obvious that instead of just giving the general public a single well written ghost story book of a satisfactory length, the publishers have opted to go the usual, presumably more lucrative series route. Which would be fine if this first volume didn't end up seeming so anticlimactic and downright bloodless by the end.
Oh well.
Even more curious perhaps, is not even the fact that Chapter 11 (in a scant 12 chapter book) is solely "About The Author," but that this supposed modern day individual apparently has the exact same first and last name as a famous English mentalist who died in 1922. Now the interesting thing about the Victorian/Edwardian age Stuart Cumberland, is that he was a die-hard opponent of spiritualism - which was of course all the rage back in those days.
You see, this now deceased Cumberland was into something called "muscle reading," because he absolutely positively did NOT believe in genuine telepathy. And, oddly enough, his primary technique for disproving telepathy (which Wikipedia defines as the "transmission of information from one person to another without using any of our known sensory channels or physical interaction") was by holding the hand of his subject to read their muscular movements! Hmm. Well, when one has physical contact with his or her subject, it's no longer really "telepathy," of course, but this particular old Cumberland fella apparently thought that by performing feats while blindfolded, and holding the hand of his subject, he could somehow disprove the phenomenon altogether.
Hmm.
At any rate, the Stuart Cumberland who supposedly wrote this particular True Ghost Stories collection doesn't even mention his Victorian/Edwardian age namesake, but he certainly does boast that he "has file cabinets going back 40 years of filled with notes, news clippings going back to the early 1800' s, correspondence and investigations" (sic). Okay. Fair enough then. Well, I was pleased and intrigued enough by the first volume to want to read the second in the series, so I suppose there's no reason to complain overmuch about any of the above. However, the website he lists, www.StuartCumberland.com was (at the time of this writing) a registered domain name, even though the site itself definitely wasn't up when I tried to peruse it. I did find a Facebook page however (https://www.facebook.com/stuartcumber...), and was of course more than happy to give the author a helpful "like" when I briefly stopped by.
To sum up, in general terms I liked the book very much at the beginning, but I thought it mostly became rather anemic by the end. The author's name intrigued me a great deal, so I went looking for him, only to find some Victorian/Edwardian age skeptic/debunker dude who was apparently terribly, terribly fond of holding the hands of perfect strangers - and all with the excuse of trying to prove that there is no such thing as telepathic ability! Hmm. Well anyway, I think I can still recommend this book to just about anyone even mildly interested in the paranormal. There are some scary moments in some of the stories (though nothing all that heart stopping for yours truly, to be sure), and at only 61 print length pages it certainly won't take most folks long to read.
But then, that's not necessarily a bad thing, is it? A great many of the similarly titled "True Ghost Stories" collections cluttering up the true paranormal market these days are mostly comprised of accounts that the publishing author had little or nothing to do with - other than that he or she obviously felt the need to include the material in his or her manuscript for whatever reason. So what left me feeling decidedly less enthusiastic about the book by the time I'd reached the end (as opposed to the beginning, when I initially felt very gratified to be reading a ghost story collection that at first seemed much better than the average) was that the strength (and most significantly, the scariness factor) of the stories seemed to decrease somewhat by the time the book had come to a close.
Bummer.
Not to give too much away, but the last story in the book (which isn't even the last chapter - the copyright information is actually listed as the last chapter, believe it or not!), was originally written by Sidney Dickenson in 1920, and entitled True Tales Of The Weird. Which would all be fine and dandy if that last story was actually much more than just... well, weird. Because it certainly isn't all that scary. It's an inexplicable true tale, to be sure, but it's not particularly frightening or even all that coherent. Nor does it seem to harmonize in any significant way with any of the previous chapters in the book. In fact, the darned story bugged and puzzled me so much, I had to go back and reread it a couple more times, just to figure out what was so blasted annoying about it.
So even though I really must reiterate that the author did do a better job (at least at the beginning) than the average ghost story collection writer, for me, the material had very much been drained of its original vitality by the bitter end. Okay, well, there's obviously a second volume by the same author that's already available, so it seems painfully obvious that instead of just giving the general public a single well written ghost story book of a satisfactory length, the publishers have opted to go the usual, presumably more lucrative series route. Which would be fine if this first volume didn't end up seeming so anticlimactic and downright bloodless by the end.
Oh well.
Even more curious perhaps, is not even the fact that Chapter 11 (in a scant 12 chapter book) is solely "About The Author," but that this supposed modern day individual apparently has the exact same first and last name as a famous English mentalist who died in 1922. Now the interesting thing about the Victorian/Edwardian age Stuart Cumberland, is that he was a die-hard opponent of spiritualism - which was of course all the rage back in those days.
You see, this now deceased Cumberland was into something called "muscle reading," because he absolutely positively did NOT believe in genuine telepathy. And, oddly enough, his primary technique for disproving telepathy (which Wikipedia defines as the "transmission of information from one person to another without using any of our known sensory channels or physical interaction") was by holding the hand of his subject to read their muscular movements! Hmm. Well, when one has physical contact with his or her subject, it's no longer really "telepathy," of course, but this particular old Cumberland fella apparently thought that by performing feats while blindfolded, and holding the hand of his subject, he could somehow disprove the phenomenon altogether.
Hmm.
At any rate, the Stuart Cumberland who supposedly wrote this particular True Ghost Stories collection doesn't even mention his Victorian/Edwardian age namesake, but he certainly does boast that he "has file cabinets going back 40 years of filled with notes, news clippings going back to the early 1800' s, correspondence and investigations" (sic). Okay. Fair enough then. Well, I was pleased and intrigued enough by the first volume to want to read the second in the series, so I suppose there's no reason to complain overmuch about any of the above. However, the website he lists, www.StuartCumberland.com was (at the time of this writing) a registered domain name, even though the site itself definitely wasn't up when I tried to peruse it. I did find a Facebook page however (https://www.facebook.com/stuartcumber...), and was of course more than happy to give the author a helpful "like" when I briefly stopped by.
To sum up, in general terms I liked the book very much at the beginning, but I thought it mostly became rather anemic by the end. The author's name intrigued me a great deal, so I went looking for him, only to find some Victorian/Edwardian age skeptic/debunker dude who was apparently terribly, terribly fond of holding the hands of perfect strangers - and all with the excuse of trying to prove that there is no such thing as telepathic ability! Hmm. Well anyway, I think I can still recommend this book to just about anyone even mildly interested in the paranormal. There are some scary moments in some of the stories (though nothing all that heart stopping for yours truly, to be sure), and at only 61 print length pages it certainly won't take most folks long to read.
February 8, 2017
I enjoyed reading this collection of true ghost and paranormal stories. The writing was well done for the most part but with several grammar errors which always seems to ruin the mood for me. I would very much like to read the entire collection of books.
September 2, 2017
Okay, nothing spectacular,
June 19, 2020
Good
I don't like the way the chapters are at the end because people like me are going to think there is more chapters then there are so please could that be changed.
I don't like the way the chapters are at the end because people like me are going to think there is more chapters then there are so please could that be changed.
August 12, 2016
Very good
While I have read one of the stories previously, in another collection, I enjoyed these short tales. I would highly recommend !!!
While I have read one of the stories previously, in another collection, I enjoyed these short tales. I would highly recommend !!!
January 9, 2017
Enjoyable
This read is for anyone who enjoys short stories about the paranormal. The only thing I didn't like was it was too short.
Enjoy!
This read is for anyone who enjoys short stories about the paranormal. The only thing I didn't like was it was too short.
Enjoy!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews