Customer Reviews

Dixie Spirits: True Tales of the Strange and Supernatural in the South

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Dixie Spirits is a collection of ghost stories from the American south. Some of the stories in this book are hauntings that are very familiar to anyone who likes to read this type of books. The gray man, the Brown Mountain lights, and the Myrtles plantation are found within the pages of this book and just about any book about southern ghosts that one chooses to read. However, there are also some hauntings to be found in this book that I was not familiar with. For example the Sloss Furnaces, the Athens haunted pillar, and the Hornet ghost light. Also, the ghosts of some of the Lee homes in Virginia were completely new to me. I suppose that anyone writing a book of this sort would have to assume that his or her readers hadn't read about the Myrtles and would feel as if they had to include such a famous haunt. I guess that those of us who frequent these books will just have to learn to live with that fact.

The only other problems I found in this book were an over abundance of Indian legends and a last second rush of UFO stories. Coleman tries to explain his use of the UFO tales but I bought a ghost book, not a UFO book and had no real desire to find UFO stories haunting this book's pages. There are also numerous typos, which are somewhat irritating.

On the other hand, the writing style of the author is very pleasing and the stories in this book seem to just fly by. I assume that he has done a fair amount of research but there is no bibliography so I can't be sure. Overall, this is a well-written and interesting book. A little off target in places but still rather good and well worth the price. Read it on a cool October evening but don't get too lost in its pages or the mothman might get you.

Dixie Spirits is a very good collection of well known and not so well known regional ghost stories. Christopher Coleman is a talented writer who tells the tales with a fresh new spin. I particularly appreciated the sympathetic treatment of African Americans and Indians in his version of the classic ghost stories. The best thing about these "true tales" is that you can visit every single place in the book. My only complaint is the way the book abruptly ends. There should have been an author's note or an index.

This was a great book about hauntings in the Southern States. This ranks up there with Katherine Tucker Windham (pardon the spelling) books. I really enjoyed it a lot. Some of the stories in this book are also in others that I have read and they match VERY closely. Get it, read it and you will love it!

Fairly informative, sometimes trite, account of ghostly happenings throughout the South. The writer's dialect seems to change from story to story, making the reader think that perhaps there is more than one author. Very light reading.

this book was very informative and entertaining and sometimes when I read it at night I'll ammit it even scared me a little the fact that florida was left out could be bad for some people i donm't know about florida ghost so it kind of bothered me but the ghost west virginia which is not a dixie state was interesting mainly because some of my college friends where from the areas described and told me about the ghost