It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
Hauntings

Hauntings

A Book of Ghosts and Where to Find Them Across 25 Eerie British Locations

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

For longer than recorded history there have been tales of spirits and of places where our hackles rise and our skin turns cold.

Bestselling historian Neil Oliver travels the British Isles on a deliciously spine-chilling tour that spans several centuries and explores more than 20 sites - castles, vicarages and towers, lonely shorelines and forgotten battlefields - to unpick their stories..

Oliver invokes his family's history alongside that of kings and queens past as he probes why our emotions and senses are heightened in certain locations where the separation between dimensions seems gossamer thin. Our landscape is riven with these places, creaking from the weight of the secrets they hold, the echoes of tragedy and dark deeds . From Inverness to Devon, Co Dublin to Norfolk, Hauntings casts an enjoyably eerie glow with stories that, told generation after generation, are inextricable from place - and considers why they matter.

©2023 Neil Oliver (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Reviews

  • Neil Oliver is such a very good writer. Haunted is a wonderful book: part history, part rumination on life, and, of course a haunting book about ghosts, both apparitions reportedly seen and heard, but also the lingering memories, shadows and spirits of those from the past. This is a beautifully written, fascinating, deeply moving and thought-provoking book that lingers in the mind long after the last page has been read.
    James Holland

About the author

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more