Ghosts, Holzer says, are people, or parts of people, and are thus governed by emotional stimuli. Ghosts are people haunted by unhappy memories and incapable of escaping from a net of emotional entanglements attendant to the memories. One should remember that an apparition is really a reenactment of an earlier emotional experience.

In The Ghost Hunter, famed ghost hunter Dr. Hans Holzer recounts more than 40 real-life ghost stories, including several of his most intriguing cases. This ever-inquisitive researcher probes the history of each of these restless spirits and sometimes even coaxes them out of seclusion.

His pursuit of things that go bump in the night takes Holzer to strange haunts. These are just a few of the spirits that you will encounter in The Ghost Hunter:

• A Revolutionary War soldier who continues to inhabit a house in the hills of New Jersey
• A Central Park West social-climbing spirit staging a postmortem sit-in because she felt that her neighbors had snubbed her
• The Bayberry Perfume ghost whose distinctive scent continues to permeate the Philadelphia house that she haunts
• A lunatic uncle whose demise hasn’t stopped him from making unwelcome visits
• The tragic Fifth Avenue Ghost who, killed by a romantic rival, remains pinned in a love triangle of 1871
• An old manor ghost who drives an entire carriage team of phantom horses