In Search of Ghosts

Famed ghost hunter Hans Holzer once told an interviewer, “There are three dirty words in my vocabulary: belief, disbelief and supernatural. They don’t exist. There’s no ‘supernatural world.’ Everything that exists is natural. Yet there is a dimension of existence that is as real as your living room, even if the average person cannot access it with all their senses.”

For five decades, this meticulous, Vienna-born researcher has been delving into manifestations that seem miraculous, moving among ghosts with a calm resolve that might have startled even the spooks. In book after book, he has documented these spirit presences, building an unprecedented bibliography of The Other Side.

In Search of Ghosts brings together some of The Ghost Hunter’s famous, astonishing, and controversial cases. Holzer recreates eerie scenes with a skillful sense of telling detail. His long, deep immersion in the field is evidenced by the vast diversity of his subjects. He writes about Bavarian poltergeists and Connecticut “left behinds”; spectral murder victims and a ghostly spy courier who refuses to disappear; a noisy spirit in a San Francisco suburb and a Revolutionary War traitor whose imprint stubbornly remains. Some posthumous visitors tiptoe; others thrash; some require the gentle coaxing of mediums.

Holzer brings alive not only phantoms who emerge from the shadows but also the average people whose everyday lives were interrupted by these unexpected nocturnal visitors and their intrusive rumblings. Like any good researcher, he realizes that context is everything. With tireless attention, he pursues his vaporish subjects back into history, separating the chaff from the wheat and puzzling out the true stories of their uneasy exits.

For Hans Holzer, things that go bump in the night are no longer phenomena to be regarded with fear or awestricken wonder. In Search of Ghosts offers you a steadying hand as he escorts you into haunted realms you never imagined so vividly.