Give it a chance and An Illustrated History of Ghosts will take you on a spooky journey around the world - but not the kind you’re used to. This isn’t a collection of ghost stories so much as a beautifully designed reference book you can dip in and out of. It sits somewhere between a coffee-table book and an accessible, well-researched guide to ghosts, hauntings, and our relationship with death.

Instead of chasing jump scares, you’re lurking in the darker corners of history, exploring different societies’ relationships with death and whatever might come after it… ghosts. This illustrated study of ghosts and hauntings digs into our long-standing fascination with death and the dead in a way that spans time and cultures. From Spiritualism to exorcisms, ghost towns, time slips and (boo hiss) even skeptics, An Illustrated History of Ghosts leaves no haunted stone unturned (which, as M. R. James warned us, is not always wise).

The book is organised thematically rather than chronologically, with each section focusing on a different theme. You move through self-contained chunks - séances here, exorcisms there, a detour into time slips - each paired with Adam Allsuch Boardman’s distinctive illustrations, which are eerie, charming, and utterly captivating.

Crucially, the information throughout is both engaging and factually accurate - a rare and welcome combination in paranormal publishing. It’s a genuinely absorbing book that’s also accessible, making it suitable for curious younger readers as well as grown-up ghost geeks who want something solid to get their teeth into.

If you’re looking for in-depth case studies or a heavy critical takedown of specific ghost hunters, this isn’t that book; it’s a wide-angle introduction to how ghosts and hauntings appear across cultures and history, not a forensic sceptical investigation. Personally, I think it fills its chosen niche very well.

One tiny detail I adore: at the back, just before the glossary, there’s an illustrated guide to People of Ghostlore and, if you look closely, there’s a tiny little me. I am, apparently, a person of ghostlore, and I’m very flattered.

Tiny illustrated ego boost aside, this is one of the few ghost books I’d happily recommend to both believers and non-believers alike.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity has firmly earned a spot on my top books list. It’s a thoughtful, compassionate tour of how different cultures care for their dead, and it landed at a time in my life when I desperately needed that perspective.

My mum died unexpectedly in September 2017. Like a lot of people, I found myself navigating hospital corridors, funeral arrangements, and the surreal quiet that follows a sudden death. I visited her in the chapel of rest on my own, not really knowing what to expect, and came away with memories that were powerful but also deeply unsettling. For a long time, those images were what I thought of first when I thought about her.

Months later, I picked up From Here to Eternity. In it, Caitlin Doughty travels to communities around the world - from the US to Mexico, Japan, Indonesia and beyond - to see the many different ways people live with and care for their dead. Each chapter focuses on a particular place or practice, combining reportage, history, and personal reflection in a way that’s surprisingly gentle, often funny, and never voyeuristic.

What I love about this book is that it quietly challenges the very narrow script many of us in the West are given about death: keep it hidden, keep it clinical, keep it quick. Doughty shows that there are other options - families who keep their loved ones at home after death, communities who stay physically close to the body, rituals that acknowledge what a dead body actually is without flinching or pretending it’s something else. Rather than feeling morbid, these stories come across as deeply human and, in many cases, very comforting.

Reading about those practices helped me reframe my own experience. I began to see that what I’d found so disturbing about seeing my mum after she died wasn’t that her body had changed - that part is entirely natural - but that I’d been given almost no cultural language or support for handling it. From Here to Eternity didn’t magically fix my grief (no book can do that), but it did help me understand that there was nothing “wrong” or shameful about what I’d seen, or how I felt. That realisation took away a chunk of the fear and allowed me to find something gentler in those memories.

As a death-positive advocate and funeral director, Doughty is open about her own views, but she doesn’t preach. She’s curious rather than judgemental, and the book balances big questions - about capitalism, environmental impact, and who gets to control what happens to our bodies - with very grounded, specific stories. The tone is accessible and conversational, so even if you’re not usually someone who reads non-fiction about death, it’s easy to follow.

If you’re looking for a step-by-step guide to planning your own funeral, this isn’t that. It’s more of a wide-angle look at what’s possible, and an invitation to think about what you might want for yourself and the people you love. I’d particularly recommend it to anyone who’s bereaved, anyone who’s anxious about death, or anyone who suspects that the way we currently do things in the UK and US might not be the only way - or the best way.

For me, From Here to Eternity did what a lot of books about grief tried and failed to do: it made death feel less like a taboo subject and more like something I’m allowed to look at directly. It helped me reconnect with my long-standing interest in death, folklore, and funerary culture, without feeling ghoulish or strange for caring about it.

And if I do come back as a ghost one day, this book has convinced me that Mexico would probably be the place to haunt. Seems a ghost would be welcome there.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

I bought Ghosts of the Tsunami just days before my mum died and, for obvious reasons, couldn’t pick it up again for a long time. When I finally did, I found it to be an extraordinary and devastating book that I’d still thoroughly recommend - with the caveat that it’s a very heavy read.

I was aware of the ghost stories linked to the areas affected by the tsunami of 2011 - particularly the testimonies from taxi drivers who picked up passengers heading for now-ruined towns, only for them to vanish mid-journey – but I’d never really considered in detail the wider cultural impact of the 2011 tsunami on how people in Japan relate to their dead.

In this book, Richard Lloyd Parry writes that “the tsunami did appalling violence to the religion of the ancestors.” It didn’t just wash away homes, schools and villages; it also destroyed household altars, memorial tablets, and family shrines. Cemeteries were shattered, and the bones of those buried there were scattered. Survivors were left not only with the unsettled dead of the tsunami itself, but with the sense that their long-honoured ancestors had been disturbed too.

One priest explains to Parry that, in a disaster, where you or I might grab our important documents, pets, or laptop, many people in Japan will rescue the memorial tablets of their ancestors first - that’s how central they are. He goes on to say that some people almost certainly died in the waters because they ran back towards danger to save those tablets instead of evacuating.

That detail stopped me in my tracks.

The tsunami didn’t only kill the living; it also, in a very real sense for those communities, harmed the spirits of the dead.

Ultimately, Ghosts of the Tsunami is less about proving or disproving the existence of ghosts and more about how people make sense of unimaginable loss. The ghost stories – including reports of hauntings and possessions after the disaster – are woven into a wider exploration of grief, faith, and the social fabric of the affected towns. It’s a deeply humane, often heartbreaking piece of reportage.

It’s not an easy book to read, and I’d be cautious about recommending it to anyone in very raw grief. But if you’re interested in how culture, belief, and catastrophe intertwine, and in what it means to live with both the living and the dead after a disaster, it’s an incredibly powerful and important book.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

Abominable Science! by Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero is one of those rare books that quietly makes the world a better place. It’s the book I wish had been around when I first fell for monsters and mystery beasts - a smart, generous, and genuinely fun tour through some of cryptozoology’s biggest names.

This isn’t a sneering takedown. It’s a carefully researched, well-referenced examination of famous cryptids - from Nessie to Bigfoot and beyond - that combines good storytelling with proper critical thinking. Loxton and Prothero lay out the history, the claims, the evidence (or lack of it), and the cultural context, and then show you how to assess it all for yourself. One of the things I love most is that you don’t have to take their word for anything: the references are extensive, so you can follow the trail as deeply as you like.

That approach feels especially important in a landscape where skeptical inquiry is still often sidelined in paranormal media. Turn on the TV and you’ll still find shows cheerfully promoting unconventional or pseudo-scientific “methods” in the hunt for monsters, with dramatic narration taking priority over accuracy. Abominable Science! is a much-needed counterbalance: it shows that you can be fascinated by strange creatures and legends without abandoning rigour or reality.

This makes it a bit of a rarity - a book that I’d recommend equally to self-identifying skeptics, curious cryptozoologists, and monster hunters who want to understand the stories they love in more depth. It doesn’t assume you’re an expert; the explanations are accessible and engaging, so you can come to it with nothing more than a passing interest in weird creatures and still get a lot out of it.

If you’re heavily committed to the literal existence of certain cryptids, this book probably won’t convert you on its own. That’s not really its job. What it does do, brilliantly, is model how to think about extraordinary claims: how myths grow, how hoaxes happen, how eyewitness testimony can mislead us, and how folklore, psychology, and honest mistakes all play their part.

When I first went to Loch Ness as a teenager, I was utterly captivated by the idea of the monster. If Abominable Science! had existed back then, it wouldn’t have ruined the magic for me – it would have deepened it. The same way the Loch Ness Centre & Exhibition manages to both debunk and delight, this book shows that understanding the science, history and culture behind legendary monsters doesn’t make them boring. It simply replaces flimsy “evidence” with the far more enduring wonder of how stories, landscapes and human perception fit together.

In my opinion, Abominable Science! is a modern classic of skeptical writing on monsters, and a wonderful resource for future generations of ghost geeks, cryptid fans and critical thinkers alike.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

Roger Clarke’s A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof is one of those books that doesn’t quite fit into a neat category. It’s not a debunking manual or a believer’s manifesto, and it’s not trying to be a pop-science explanation of ghosts either. It’s essentially a long wander through five centuries of people seeing, reporting, arguing about, and profiteering from ghosts.

Clarke writes as someone who has been quietly obsessed with ghosts since childhood, and that’s very obvious in the tone. The book opens with personal memories of the haunted house he grew up in and his early brush with the Society for Psychical Research. That thread of slightly geeky enthusiasm runs right through. He clearly loves this material, and he’s good at telling a story: each chapter feels like being sat down and told, “Right, let me tell you about this haunting.”

The structure is loosely chronological but also a bit taxonomic. Rather than simply marching through the centuries, Clarke groups hauntings by type and cultural moment. We get the famous poltergeists, the Victorian apparitions, the noisy mediums, the frauds, the almost-certainly-frauds, and the cases that never really resolve one way or another. Classic stories like the Cock Lane ghost, Borley Rectory, and Hinton Ampner all make an appearance, often with more historical detail than you usually see in TV documentaries or popular ghost books.

What I liked most is that in A Natural History of Ghosts, Clarke is really writing about people more than he’s writing about ghosts. Mediums, clergy, magicians, aristocrats, servants, grieving parents, bored journalists – everyone is in here. You get a strong sense of how ghosts change shape depending on who is telling the story and what they need from it. Sometimes they’re weapons in religious arguments, sometimes tools of social control or ways of talking about grief, and sometimes they’re just good theatre.

Clarke also has an eye for how class and respectability shape haunting narratives. A maid reporting a ghost in a country house gets handled very differently to the vicar seeing something, or the local squire having a strange experience. The book is at its best when it’s quietly pointing this out and letting you join the dots - who gets believed, who gets dismissed, and who manages to turn a haunting into a career.

One thing worth saying, especially if you’re coming to this from a more skeptical angle, is that Clarke doesn’t really set out to solve anything. There are nods towards fraud, misperception, and suggestion, and he’s not credulous, but he’s also not interested in spending chapters on psychology experiments or brain science. He’s a historian and storyteller first and if you want a tour through the cultural history of ghosts, this is a wonderful read.

Each chapter is essentially a mini-case study and I enjoyed being along for the ride, but readers who prefer a very tight, thesis-driven structure might get a bit impatient. For me, though, this was part of its charm. Clarke isn’t trying to cover everything; he’s trying to show how certain hauntings and ideas about ghosts evolved, got recycled, and still echo in the way we talk about haunted houses today. If you’ve watched a lot of paranormal TV or read older ghost literature, you’ll recognise the bones of a lot of modern stories in here.

Ultimately, A Natural History of Ghosts is delightful. I have bought three copies as mine get borrowed. Readers of this blog are sure to enjoy this book.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.

It’s been a long time since a book about ghosts gave me the same gut-level excitement I used to feel heading out on ghost investigations with my research team, but Stop Worrying! There Probably Is an Afterlife by Greg Taylor came very close. At its best, it reminded me of the buzz I got reading Mary Roach’s Six Feet Over or Will Storr’s Will Storr vs the Supernatural: that feeling of watching someone follow their genuine curiosity into strange territory.

Taylor’s book explores a range of research and claims related to life after death – from historical investigations to modern studies – and presents them in a very readable, narrative style. What really struck me is that it leans heavily on the kind of serious research that has underpinned paranormal discussion for decades, rather than the flashy pop-paranormal fluff you see on TV. His section on deathbed visitations, in particular, genuinely moved me. The stories he shares are powerful, and the joy and comfort they bring to the people who experience them is hard to ignore. In many ways, that’s what ghost stories often are: ways of making sense of love, loss and the hope of reunion.

That said, there are parts of the book that didn’t quite land for me. In some sections, especially around mediumship research, I felt we were being asked to accept conclusions that didn’t follow a fully logical route. Taylor discusses the work of Dr Julie Beischel, who openly says her experiments aren’t designed to satisfy sceptics so much as to create the ‘right conditions’ for communication. She describes blinding mediums to sitters while still assuming that a sitter’s deceased loved one (“discarnate”) can and will communicate, and puts emphasis on particularly striking “hits” in readings – those so-called “dazzle shots” – as meaningful evidence.

For me, this is where alarm bells start to ring. Focusing on the impressive hits while giving less weight to the misses is a form of cherry-picking that I recognise all too well from my own believer days. It’s exactly how I used to treat my ghost-hunting experiences: highlight the weird bits, quietly forget the boring failures, and then treat that edited version as proof.

The same goes for deathbed visitations. They are fascinating, profound experiences and absolutely worth studying, but I think it’s a leap to treat them as straightforward evidence of survival after death. There are so many psychological, neurological and cultural factors that could play a role that I don’t think we’re in any position to rule those out and jump straight to “therefore: afterlife”.

Where the book really does succeed, though, is in treating this material as part of a larger historical and cultural story. You don’t have to believe in an afterlife to find these cases and traditions interesting, and on that level I think Taylor does a good job. I’m not keen on sceptics who dismiss the book outright without reading it simply because of the author’s beliefs; I don’t share his conclusions, but I do think the material is worth engaging with.

Overall, I’d recommend Stop Worrying! There Probably Is an Afterlife to anyone who’s genuinely interested in paranormal research and ghosts, with one important caveat: read it with your critical faculties switched firmly on. Take the time to look up the studies mentioned, examine the methods, and reach your own conclusions. For me, one of the strongest signs that this is a worthwhile book is that it’s added several more titles to my “to read” pile – and anything that sends you off exploring further is doing something right.

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When I found out that Dom Joly had written a book about his adventures as a monster hunter, I knew immediately I had to read it – I just wasn’t sure what I was signing up for. Would it make a cheap mockery of cryptozoology? Was Joly secretly a wide-eyed believer who accepts anything as evidence? I genuinely didn’t know.

The book, Scary Monsters & Super Creeps, turns out to be neither of those things. It’s essentially a comic travelogue with monsters: Joly wanders the world chasing famous cryptids – Yeti, Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster and more – and reports back in his usual dry, slightly chaotic style. There are no groundbreaking discoveries in its pages, and there are a few factual slips (poor Adrian Shine is renamed “Adrian Shiner”), so anyone looking for serious cryptozoological research won’t find it here. But as a funny, enthusiastic account of one man indulging his childhood fascinations, it really works.

Joly has been a big fan of Arthur C. Clarke since childhood, and that genuine affection for weird stories shines through. As he documents his trips as a “professional monster hunter” – a tongue-in-cheek title he trots out to impress people he meets – it quickly becomes clear he doesn’t have the deep background in cryptozoology that a researcher might. He’s occasionally impressed by “evidence” or anecdotes that seasoned monster-nerds would find hard to get excited about. But honestly, that’s part of the charm: you don’t have to be an expert to be interested in strange creatures, and this book leans into that.

There are moments that are properly laugh-out-loud funny. Without spoiling anything, there’s a skinny-dipping scene that made me cry with laughter on a packed train, to the point where I ended up reading it aloud to a stranger because I’d completely lost composure. That’s not something most cryptozoology books can claim.

If you want rigorous analysis, tight referencing and a skeptical deep dive, this isn’t the book for you. Think of it instead as hanging out with an excitable friend who’s decided to blow their budget on monster-hunting trips and then tell you what happened over a pint. It’s light, entertaining, occasionally daft, and powered by genuine curiosity.

It’s good to stay curious and to chase your strange little dreams; in this case, Joly’s dreams happen to be monsters, and chase them he does. Does he actually find the Yeti, Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster? You’ll have to read it yourself to find out – but the fun is really in the trying.

The Ghost Geek is an award-winning science blog about spooky things, written by Hayley Stevens, a former ghost hunter who is now studying for a Master’s in Forensic Psychology and uses scientific scepticism to investigate strange claims.