Customer Reviews

Cape Encounters: Contemporary Cape Cod Ghost Stories

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For any one who has traveled to the Cape and experienced the history and charm of its small New England towns, this book could serve as a guidebook for noted ghost stories of the area. Researched with interviews of local townsfolk, you experience each tale through their eyes and words. From the ordinary patter of unknown footsteps, to the bizarre sighting of yard sale skeletons, each story is unique, gripping and independent from the last one. A great read in increments or cover-to-cover, this book sheds a spooky and entertaining light on a much loved vacation community.

I have always been interested in ghost stories. I especially love hearing about personal experiences. This was a great book told from the perspective of the person who had experienced ghostly encounters on the Cape. I loved that the book was a series of short stories, as a mom of two with a demanding work schedule I could read the stories and not have to close the book in the middle of a section. The problem was that the book was so fascinating that I could not put it down! I would recommend this book to anyone!

This book gets you from the first page. It will capture you with the characters, (in fact, real characters) and the imagine of each story. The book is filled with real life stories of real houses in the Cape. For those of you that have spent a day - years down there, you will feel a sense of understanding from the begining. The authors have done an incredible job of giving you a sense of what the landmarks look like today and the discription of each individual. You can tell how much work went into this book. I highly recommend!

The authors of this book have attempted to take a different approach to writing this type of book and for the most part they have succeeded. Of course any attempt to break out and try something new will be accompanied by some growing pains and there are a few miss-steps to be found here also.

The best thing about this book is that it relies so heavily on first person eyewitness accounts of encounters with ghosts. The authors have generally avoided jumping in and adding to the stories but just allow the people that they are interviewing to tell the story themselves. This method is not only refreshing but it also gives the reader a far more realistic feel for the people of Cape Cod. On the other hand, a little editing might have been in order with a few stories because some of the interviewees tended to ramble on just a bit. In a couple of the stories the rambling got so bad that the whole jest of the story was completely lost. Fortunately, most of the people who told their stories were apparently Jack Webb fans and gave us "just the facts."

One other problem was the authors' obvious disdain for checking out the background of the haunt in question. Admittedly, this is often a tedious process that produces no concrete results but sometimes this kind of research produces stunning results. These authors just brush this whole process off as irrelevant sensationalism and any background provided comes from the people being interviewed. To me, this type of research is simply a valid historical method that is vital to the understanding of current hauntings.

There is also something that shows up all too often in this book that is a trait of all books of this genre that deal with hauntings north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Everybody who lives in an old house and finds a hidden passage or room always wants to claim that it was used as part of the Underground Railroad and there are at least two cases of this assumption in this book. In reality, especially along the coast, most of these rooms and passages were used for smuggling, which was a huge coastal enterprise, especially in New England. I know that it's not nice to burst people's bubble but facts are facts.

Despite the flaws in this book, I really liked the approach that the authors have taken by letting the witnesses speak for themselves. The stories themselves are very interesting and I have seldom read a book that caught the flavor of an area as well as this one does. The "outside the box" thinking behind this book more than makes up for some of it's flaws and makes this volume a highly desirable addition to any ghost book collection. If these authors will just agree to do a little more historical research than I think that they can look forward to a great future in this business.

As someone who grew up in a haunted Massachusetts home built in 1788, I can admire the authors' appreciation of the value that the Cape Cod community places on preserving its historical & generational traditions. The authors have captured the local flavor of this unique heritage quite well.

However, while the local lore is enjoyable and I appreciate the authors' lack of embellishment, several of the stories failed to hold my interest for long. Although I liked that the stories are first-hand accounts of ghost encounters, rather than another book of rehashed tales from the past, some of the story-tellers ramble a bit, and several of the stories could have done with a more selective editing job.

The book does have its strong points, and some of the more pithy stories are page turners. However, overall, I found Mark Jasper's "Haunted Cape Cod & the Islands" a more engaging read.