AG

  • Hauntings Part 4: Lincoln Ghost Train

    As soon as I was old enough to have free rein in the library, I have gravitated to ghost stories. I used to give myself nightmares reading “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” and later the short-lived “Tales from the Crypt” graphic novels. But always the stories that drew me in hard, the ones that still linger in my dreams to this very day were the ones involving ghostly vehicles. Ghost ships, ghost trains, ghost cars. And despite what I have come to understand about ghosts, such things still give me the heebie-jeebies. There are number of reported sightings of such things over the years. The Mary Celeste, the…

  • Terra-Cotta Rock and Rolla’: Qin Shi Huang

    (To the tune of Billy Joel’s classic rock and roll hit: “Christie Lee”:youtube.com/watch?v=ru-gkHHwDb4) Let me tell you a story, About a man who was king! He lorded ancient China, In the dynasty that was Qin! The man was born in two-six zero In the time of BCE. And he conquered all the nations! So they could all be Chinese! He expanded China’s borders, he also affected economy. He standardized the education, by burning books and the scholary… He searched and searched for a death cure, sought to beat mortality. Sent Xu Fu to seek an elixir! But Xu Fu would found the Japanese! Qin Shi Huang, Qin Shi Huang! Qin…

  • Hauntings, Part 3: The Stanley Hotel

    Did you ever see or read “The Shining”? It tells the story of the Overlook Hotel located in the Colorado Rockies and the family that stays there to act as caretakers during the winter off season. It is a ghost story and I’ll admit a rather terrifying one (though in my opinion the book is way scarier than the movie), but the ultimate themes of the book are abuse, alcoholism, and madness. The book itself was a result of Stephen King visiting a place in Colorado called the Stanley Hotel and the Overlook is primarily based on that. The Stanley Hotel is allegedly quite haunted, though the ghosts at the…

  • Hauntings, Part 2: Anne Boleyn

    In Part 1 (http://www.historynaked.com/hauntings-part-1/ ) I state that most hauntings are the result of boredom on behalf of a young ghost, but there are other types of hauntings as well. One of the most common is a residual haunting. I have theories about why this happens and, since I am not the kind of guy to throw around words like “psychic” or phrases like “extra-sensory perception” I have to bring it back to a quasi-scientific standpoint. If you want to skip the bad science to the conclusion, count down to the third paragraph and go from there. 😀 Our bodies are made up of infinitesimal pieces that bond together to make…

  • Hauntings, Part 1

    In honor of Halloween, I have been asked to talk about hauntings. The primary reason why I have been asked as opposed to others is that I have worked in the past as a paranormal investigator. I first need to qualify this with a few facts: I am a skeptic. Always have been, always will be. I believe that science and hard evidence is more important than gut feelings and stories (which is ironic as I am primarily a fantasy author). Additionally, there are certain things that I am simply not comfortable discussing in open forum, so there are some things that I am straight up not going to talk…