Book Review: This House is Haunted: True Encounters with the World Beyond by Hans Holzer

16000187Title: This House is Haunted: True Encounters with the World Beyond

Author: Hans Holzer

Genre: True Haunting, Non Fiction

Rating: 3,5 stars

Purchase: Amazon, B&N

Review copy provided by the publisher through Netgalley.

Join paranormal expert and storyteller extraordinaire Hans Holzer as he investigates the most famous, and infamous, real-life haunted houses

Perhaps no other paranormal situation captures our imagination more than a haunted house. The idea of sharing a home with the dead is unsettling for the current inhabitants, but according to professor Hans Holzer, it can be equally as upsetting to the ghost. In The House Is Haunted, Holzer explores more than eighty haunted houses—all over the United States and abroad—dissects their history, and speculates on the reasons the otherworldly inhabitants continue to stay in their earthly abodes.

This House is Haunted: True Encounters with the World Beyond tells us the adventures of paranormal investigator Hans Holzer and he visits haunted houses and gives detailed accounts of his experiences there. Hans Holzer is a firm believer in mediums, so he brings along a medium on each of his visits, and then compares what the medium experiences with historical records, and the experiences of people living in the haunted house. He has a compelling writing style, but in my opinion, the book is simply too long. Halfway through, I wanted it to end. The book is nothing more than a case-by-case rundown of all Holzer’s haunted house cases, and it gets kind of boring at the halfway mark. At the end, I was glad the book was done.

Holzer was a pioneer in paranormal research. He brought along video equipment, wrote down notes during interviews, cross-checked with historical facts, and used psychics to conduct paranormal research. His methods were thought-through and he tried to use scientific methods whenever he could. I was a bit dissapointed to see how much he relied on psychics, but to each their own. Some of the cases were very similar, and by the end I had trouble keeping them apart. The photographs were the most interesting parts of the book for me, even if it was mostly orbs, and I’m not a huge believer in orbs.

The book was detailed and fluently written, and it intrigued me because most of the cases described were from the sixties, when paranormal investigation was in its baby shoes.

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