Este sitio utiliza cookies para ofrecer nuestros servicios, mejorar el rendimiento, análisis y (si no estás registrado) publicidad. Al usar LibraryThing reconoces que has leído y comprendido nuestros términos de servicio y política de privacidad. El uso del sitio y de los servicios está sujeto a estas políticas y términos.
Who's that? Is someone there? A whisper of air brushes your cheek. Then all is still. Maybe it was just the wind. Or maybe it wasn't. . . . Maybe you've just been visited by the late Ida Day lurking in the basement of Hutchinson's public library or the widow Tarot staring forlornly from an upstairs window at Fort Scott, or the phantom Earl floating behind the scenes in Concordia's Brown Grand Theater. And maybe the horrific Albino Woman truly does haunt Topeka, turning romantic nights into nightmares. . . . maybe. Pursuing the stories behind these and other spectral manifestations, Lisa Hefner Heitz has traveled the state in search of its ghostly folklore. What she has unearthed is a fascinating blend of oral histories, contemporary eye-witness accounts, and local legends. Creepy and chilling, sometimes humorous, and always engaging, her book features tales about ghosts, poltergeists, spook lights, and a host of other restless spirits that haunt Kansas. Heitz's spine-tingling collection of stories raps and taps and moans and groans through a wealth of descriptions of infamous Kansas phantoms, as well as disconcerting personal experiences related by former skeptics. Many of these ghosts, she shows, are notoriously linked to specific structures or locations, whether it is an eighteenth-century mansion in Atchison or a deep--some have claimed bottomless--pool near Ashland. The evanescent apparitions of these tales have frightened and at times amused Kansans throughout the state's long history. Yet this is the first book to capture for posterity the lively antics of the state's ghostly denizens. Besides preserving a colorful and imaginative, if intangible, side of the state's popular heritage, Heitz supplies ghost-storytellers with ample hair-raising material for, well, eternity. Maybe that person breathing softly behind you has another such story to share. Oh, no one's there? Perhaps it really was just the breeze off the prairie.… (más)
Picked up in Kansas a few years ago. There are lots of regional ghost story books out there; mostly compilations by credulous local historians or journalists; Haunted Kansas author Lisa Hefner Heitz takes an interesting approach – that of a folklorist. This allows her to subtly debunk (by tracking down and demonstrating the roots of the stories) without alienating the potential audience of believers. I was surprised to find how many of the hauntings had a very recent origin; for example, the Albino Woman of Topeka, a ghost who wanders Riverside Cemetery with her equally ghostly dog, can be traced back to an actual albino woman who lived and worked in Topeka in the 1930s. She has since metamorphosed into a whole regiment of specters, ranging from a benign spirit who wanders among the tombstones carrying a toy poodle, through an unquiet corpse whose (albino) hands reach out of her grave to drag down anyone unlucky enough to walk over it, to a highly unpleasant creature who (accompanied by a pit bull; presumably more effective at this sort of thing than a toy poodle) materializes outside cars parked in the local Lovers Lane and rips the head off the male half of the couple. (“Other than that, dear, how was your date?”) This leads to another of Heitz’s themes; many of the stories seemed designed to discourage teenagers from parking in remote locations and necking in the back seat of a car. I wonder whether they might have the opposite effect; the potential of encountering the decapitating Albino Woman or the cannibalistic Hamburger Man might add an additional frisson to adolescent groping.
Another theme is the recasting of widespread folklore as a local legend. The New Mexican La Llorona, a spirit of various attributes who roams around wailing after her lost children, has been transformed in the Kansas to Theorosa, who lurks under or around a bridge over Jester Creek in Valley Center, Kansas, supposedly searching for her drowned children. (Interestingly, Theorosa is most likely to appear to Valley Center High School students who have parked near the bridge for impromptu nighttime biology lessons). In 1996, students in an English class at Valley Center High collected over thirty versions of the Theorosa story. (In an example of ghostly cross-fertilization, the Albino Woman mentioned above also sometimes materializes under a bridge. Perhaps Theorosa gets a night off every once and a while).
A few of the stories are genuinely mystifying – not that Ms. Heitz (or I) believe in ghosts but that there’s no obvious rational explanation for the phenomenon. The ghost of Julie, a young prostitute who used to work out of room 20 in a hotel in Wichita, has appeared to several people as an apparition described as a “floating pile of baby blue handkerchiefs”. I can think of lots of ways to explain the traditional transparent ghostly shapes, but an optical illusion that would appear as a pile of floating blue handkerchiefs is beyond me.
Interesting in its way; doubtless if I ever visit Kansas again I will check out some of the haunted locales. Especially if I can come up with a back seat necking partner. ( )
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
I have always been interested in witchcraft and superstition, but have never had much traffic with ghosts, so I began asking people everywhere what they thought about such things, and I began to find out that there was one common factor - most people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, bu almost everyone will admit that sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly could meet a ghost if they weren't careful - if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first. --Shirley Jackson, from "Experience and fiction," a lecture, 1958
Ghosts, it is advanced, either do not exist at all, or else, like the stars at noonday, they are there all the time and it is we who cannot see them. --Oliver Onion, from "Credo," The Collected Ghost Stories, 1935
"Ay, but there's this in it," said the landlord. "There's folks, i' my opiion, they can't see ghos'es, not if they stood as plain as a pikestaff before 'em. And there's reason i' that. For there's my wife, now, can't smell, not if she'd the strongest o' cheese under her nose. I never see'd a ghost myself but then I says to myself, 'Very like I haven't got the smell of 'em.' And so, I'm for holding with both sides; for, as I say, the truth lies between 'em." --George Eliot, Silas Marner, 1861
From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us! --Cornish prayer
Dedicatoria
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
To the memory of my parents, Gene and Reeselynn Hefner
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
Introduction: The crowd began gathering on the sidewalk shortly after 11:00 pm, standing in the dark beneath an ancient elm tree.
Citas
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
As the author Roald Dahl has said, "Spookiness is, after all, the real purpose of the ghost story. It should give you the creeps and disturb your thoughts.
Who's that? Is someone there? A whisper of air brushes your cheek. Then all is still. Maybe it was just the wind. Or maybe it wasn't. . . . Maybe you've just been visited by the late Ida Day lurking in the basement of Hutchinson's public library or the widow Tarot staring forlornly from an upstairs window at Fort Scott, or the phantom Earl floating behind the scenes in Concordia's Brown Grand Theater. And maybe the horrific Albino Woman truly does haunt Topeka, turning romantic nights into nightmares. . . . maybe. Pursuing the stories behind these and other spectral manifestations, Lisa Hefner Heitz has traveled the state in search of its ghostly folklore. What she has unearthed is a fascinating blend of oral histories, contemporary eye-witness accounts, and local legends. Creepy and chilling, sometimes humorous, and always engaging, her book features tales about ghosts, poltergeists, spook lights, and a host of other restless spirits that haunt Kansas. Heitz's spine-tingling collection of stories raps and taps and moans and groans through a wealth of descriptions of infamous Kansas phantoms, as well as disconcerting personal experiences related by former skeptics. Many of these ghosts, she shows, are notoriously linked to specific structures or locations, whether it is an eighteenth-century mansion in Atchison or a deep--some have claimed bottomless--pool near Ashland. The evanescent apparitions of these tales have frightened and at times amused Kansans throughout the state's long history. Yet this is the first book to capture for posterity the lively antics of the state's ghostly denizens. Besides preserving a colorful and imaginative, if intangible, side of the state's popular heritage, Heitz supplies ghost-storytellers with ample hair-raising material for, well, eternity. Maybe that person breathing softly behind you has another such story to share. Oh, no one's there? Perhaps it really was just the breeze off the prairie.
Another theme is the recasting of widespread folklore as a local legend. The New Mexican La Llorona, a spirit of various attributes who roams around wailing after her lost children, has been transformed in the Kansas to Theorosa, who lurks under or around a bridge over Jester Creek in Valley Center, Kansas, supposedly searching for her drowned children. (Interestingly, Theorosa is most likely to appear to Valley Center High School students who have parked near the bridge for impromptu nighttime biology lessons). In 1996, students in an English class at Valley Center High collected over thirty versions of the Theorosa story. (In an example of ghostly cross-fertilization, the Albino Woman mentioned above also sometimes materializes under a bridge. Perhaps Theorosa gets a night off every once and a while).
A few of the stories are genuinely mystifying – not that Ms. Heitz (or I) believe in ghosts but that there’s no obvious rational explanation for the phenomenon. The ghost of Julie, a young prostitute who used to work out of room 20 in a hotel in Wichita, has appeared to several people as an apparition described as a “floating pile of baby blue handkerchiefs”. I can think of lots of ways to explain the traditional transparent ghostly shapes, but an optical illusion that would appear as a pile of floating blue handkerchiefs is beyond me.
Interesting in its way; doubtless if I ever visit Kansas again I will check out some of the haunted locales. Especially if I can come up with a back seat necking partner. ( )