Fans of the popular Ghost Hunters – arguably the very first television show that catapulted chasing the paranormal into the national spotlight – will find much to love about A Life With Ghosts, a new book written by one of the original Ghost Hunters Steve Gonsalves (and Michael Aloisi).
A Life With Ghosts: True, Terrifying, and Insightful Tales from My Favorite Haunts is Gonsalves’s first book, and it is a satisfying and engaging read.
Through its pages, the reader is brought along through the various locations Gonsalves has investigated as a part of Ghost Hunters and other paranormal shows Ghost Hunters Academy and Ghost Nation.
The 16 locations include the infamous prison Alcatraz, Pennhurst State School and Hospital, the Stanley Hotel, Alexandria Zoo, and the USS North Carolina.
Each chapter begins very similarly to an episode of Ghost Hunters, with a few paragraphs of each location’s history as well as the particular unexplained activities going on there.
Gonsalves – a mild-mannered former police officer – starts out the book writing about how he first got interested in the paranormal. He recalls how he watched the movie The Entity on late night television when he was a kid. The film portrays a woman plagued by a menacing presence. Eventually two college students help her investigate what’s happening to her and her family.
Words that came up on the screen after the movie – “The film you have just seen is a fictionalized account of a true incident…” had Gonsalves hooked. He writes, “the idea that the events dramatized in that terrifying film really happened forever transferred how I saw the world.”
Following this inspiration, he started looking for ghosts everywhere, and what started as a hobby and a passion became a full-time job that garnered him and his fellow ghost hunters national attention.
There is a certain charm about how Gonsalves enthusiastically discusses his first experiences looking for evidence of ghosts and a sweetness when he recalls how much his family, renowned demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren, and others inspired him as he honed his skills as an investigator.
The thing that made Ghost Hunters stick out when the show first came out is that their approach is to debunk the idea of a haunting, and Gonsalves goes into why some common household problems can be mistaken for ghosts.
He also goes over some “best practices” for aspiring investigators including staying safe in older structures or watching for wild animals like raccoons and never investigating anything alone.
In the end, whether you believe in ghosts or not, the month of October is the perfect time to pick up this compilation of some good old-fashioned ghost stories, and Gonsalves is the perfect host to take the trip with.
If you’d like to hear more from Steve Gonsalves, be sure to click right here for a number of interviews with the author, director, and paranormal investigator.
A Life With Ghosts: True, Terrifying, and Insightful Tales from My Favorite Haunts is currently available at finer book stores everywhere.
