Review: Haunted Stuff: Demonic Dolls, Screaming Skulls & Other Creepy Collectibles by Stacey Graham

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Llewellyn Publications (August 8, 2014)
• ISBN-10: 0738739081
• Source: Author

There’s a reason so many of us find dolls to be creepy. Their uncanny likeness to human children. Their lifelike eyes and expressions. Horror movies often pick up on this fear, manipulating our terror by focusing on a demonic doll that torments anyone that crosses its path.

Sometimes, however, our fears are validated when we learn of dolls and other inanimate objects that seem to have a ghostly presence tied to it. In Haunted Stuff: Demonic Dolls, Screaming Skulls & Other Creepy Collectibles, Graham examines a host of reports of haunted objects and places, from skulls refusing to be removed from their homes to portraits that transform right before one’s eyes.

As a fan of antique stores, flea markets, and yard sales, I’ve always been wary of sinister feelings I experience when I handle a particular object. Graham has evidence to prove that objects close to a person can hold on to their essence long after that person has passed.  Some of the more chilling segments hit me quite close to home…hauntings that take place in the very town in which I live, or sites that I have visited myself.

As an avid reader and viewer of anything remotely ghostlike, I was familiar with a few of the objects Graham featured.  A startling number were new to me. Unlike other books of this sort, Graham provides readers with advice on how to deal with haunted objects they experience and provides testimony by the victims of these haunted objects. Each segment is brief yet vivid with detail. Additionally, Graham inserts her own experience in ghostly matters, adding a wholly personal and therefore believable spin to this haunting collection. All in all, Graham provides a truly captivating and chilling read.

Haunted Stuff is the perfect reading material for the upcoming Halloween season, or to read at a campfire late at night. The cover alone sends chills down my spine! As a writer “about the spookier side of life,” Graham has degrees in both history and archaeology/anthropology. She knows her stuff when it comes to haunted history.

If you are looking for a book that will give you goosebumps, sending chills down your spine, Haunted Stuff: Demonic Dolls, Screaming Skulls & Other Creepy Collectibles is the book for you. A must read this Halloween season. Highly recommended.

Come back tomorrow for a spooktacular guest post from Stacey Graham herself!