Spooky season is right around the corner!

I have a lot of upcoming October content planned, so I thought I would officially kick off the Halloween season on the blog by sharing a spooky cemetery book review. It’s called Haunted Cemeteries: True Tales From Beyond the Grave by Edrick Thay.

Earlier this summer, I wrote a guest post for The Haunted Walk, titled Beyond the Headstones: 5 Surprising Secrets to Discover in Cemeteries. So when I was in Ottawa this summer visiting family, I made it a point to pop into the Haunted Walk office, on Sparks Street, to say hello. While there, I browsed their spooky-cute gift shop and this book jumped out. I thought it was a pretty fitting purchase.

Haunted Cemeteries was first published in 2004 by Ghost House Books, a part of Lone Pine Publishing. Ghost House has published a large series of books all focusing on local legends, ghosts, hauntings, and other unexplained phenomenon.¹ Haunted Cemeteries is a collection of stories about the world’s most notoriously haunted cemeteries and graveyards. The majority of the cemetery stories come from the United States, but the book does feature two cemeteries that are located in Ontario; Drummond Hill Cemetery in Niagara Falls and Burkholder Cemetery in Hamilton.

Here is the book synopsis from Goodreads:

“Cemeteries are places of quiet repose where the dead are left to eternal rest. But some spirits refuse to rest in peace. Join Edrick Thay as he explores some of the world’s most notoriously haunted graveyards, both past and present, and interviews ghost hunters to discover how these eerie sites become charged with paranormal energy.

Plagued by nightmares, a mother has her daughter exhumed from Mount Carmel Cemetery in Chicago, only to make a shocking discovery paranormal researchers encounter spirits of wounded soldiers in Ontario’s Drummond Hill Cemetery, once the site of bloody conflagration when an archaeologist discovers a sealed tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, he awakens a terrifying ancient curse at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, ghosts of celebrities from another era float among the decrepit tombstones Anomalous Luminous Phenomena, or mysterious lights that defy explanation, illuminate Silver Cliff Cemetery in Colorado Ohio ghosthunters descend on Camp Chase Cemetery in Columbus, hoping to come across the captivating Lady in Gray a high school girl, fascinated with the paranormal, encounters a particularly irritable ghost at Bachelor’s Grove in Chicago in Salem, Massachusetts, site of the infamous witch trails, a ghost materializes, still mourning his inhuman death”

Haunted Cemeteries features 19 stories and a handful of black-and-white cemetery photos. The short stories made this an easy book to pick up when I had a few minutes to read. I appreciate those types of books.

The book includes some more well-known cemetery hauntings, like Bachelor’s Grove in Chicago and the Egyptian curse of King Tut’s tomb, but also highlights some lesser-known hauntings and folklore. As an avid reader of cemeteries and the supernatural, discovering these new unfamiliar stories was a lot of fun.

Overall, this was a fun and easy read, and I enjoyed the ghostly tales that can sometimes surround cemeteries. Reading about ghost stories, legends and reputed curses from beyond the grave is always a great way to ease into the Halloween season—especially when it also involves exploring the rich history of cemeteries.

Thanks for reading! 

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I am always on the hunt for cemetery-related book recommendations. If you are an author and have a cemetery-related book you would like me to review, please reach out at hello@chantallarochelle.ca. I would love to hear from you.

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References:

1. Ghost House | One Pine Publishing