An intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history, Ghostland takes readers on a road trip through some of the country's most infamously haunted places — and deep into the dark side of our history. Shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize 2020 for autobiography and memoir, and the 2020 East Anglian Book Awards.

In such uncertain times then, it is perhaps no wonder that so many of us, dubbed ‘the haunted generation’ by the Fortean Times, remain preoccupied with the ghosts that have shaped us: the stories we’ve loved since childhood, the genius loci of our landscape, or those collective and personal memories that lurk in the edgelands of our minds, too fleeting or too painful to bring into full focus. Sometimes simply being in a strange building—spending the night in a haunted hotel, for example—was enough to leave me with a feeling that I wanted to know more. Parnell’s specifics and the images he creates show a distinct link between various landscapes and how they inspired some very haunting tales which maintain their power to impress readers to this day. Lange habe ich nachgedacht, wie man "Eerie stories" eigentlich am besten auf Deutsch überträgt, denn "Unheimliche Geschichten" oder "Gruselige Geschichten" trifft es nur zum Teil. Stuffed with fascinating insights into what may or may not have been intended, this really is a fab read for anyone who has ever felt the hairs on their neck rise as they read a ghost story.

It feels cathartic; Parnell’s longing for ‘reconciliation with the ghosts of the past’ we hope fulfilled. Our country’s ghost stories are themselves the dreams (or nightmares) of a nation, the Freudian slips of whole communities: uncomfortable and unbidden expressions of things we’d assumed were long past and no longer important. We like our view this country as a unified, cohesive whole based on progress, a perpetual refinement of values, and an arc of history bending towards justice—but the prevalence of ghosts suggests otherwise.

Barbara is a full-time lecturer at the University of Brighton where she teaches on an eclectic range of creative writing, media, literature and language modules and a part-time doctoral student at Central Saint Martins (UAL) where she is pursuing a practice-based PhD within comics studies which fuses psychogeography, folk horror and witch histories. If American history is taught to schoolchildren as a series of great, striding benchmarks, the history of America’s ghost stories is one of crimes left unsolved or transgressions we now feel guilty about. The section on The Wicker Man left me wondering if he'd actually visited Galloway because it's treated so superficially.Allison Wexler, who tags along out of professional curiosity, eager to study the new tech’s psychological effect on the user. From the author of The Unidentified, an intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history that takes readers on a road trip through some of the country's most infamously haunted places --and deep into the dark side of our history.