Customer Reviews

The Ghosts on 87th Lane: A True Story

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

The Ghosts on 87th Lane by M.L. Woelm is basically an accrued collection of the author's journal entries from March 1968 through May 2006. These entries cover 39 years of paranormal (and normal) activities experienced in her home for 39 years (+).

Mrs. Woelm is a good writer, and an entertaining one as well. Many of her statements are clever and funny, but I personally believe that her book was too long. The book could have been half the size and still portrayed her story to the reader.

Many of the paranormal activites were redundant and to mention them once, twice, or, even three times would have sufficed. In addition, I think she spent too much time and effort on personal events that had little to do with the actual paranormal activities. I think I know more about her husband than the "ghosties" themselves.

I can easily empathize with the author's frustrations and fears, but she constantly tried to persuade the reader that she was not going insane. Many years ago (1988?) I read Whitley Strieber's "Communion", wherein he did the same thing. Actually, I believe that these hauntings became somewhat of a "comfort-blanket" (in an eskewed sense),for Mrs. Woelm.

The actual hauntings and poltergeist activities were real enough to the reader. Despite the "house-cleaning" I suspect there may be more to 87th Lane than just a "spiritual depot" for wondering ghosts. For instance, what type of ground was the home built upon? What lies beneath the structure itself?

I read this book because of the readers' reviews. I was sorely disapointed. Not that I wish to be unkind, but I found the author's style to be boring and without depth. The book droned on and on and wasn't the least bit scary. I had a hard time believing what I was reading and lost interest very early on.

If you are looking for a good scare this is not the book for you.
There are a few creepy things happening in her home at first but most of the story consists of hearing tapping and other things that could have just been ignored. It was well written and a fun read but just not scary.

How seldom does one find a book like this! This is my favorite of all the personal hauntings that have hit the bookshelves in the past two years.

What makes this book intriguing is:
1) The haunting went on for decades.
2) The author chronicles her personal struggle in learning to live with the haunting when no one else would believe her.
3) The ordinary life she describes interspersed with her nights of terror are very thought provoking--what would you do if faced with the same events?

The author struggles with fear of the unknown, personal rejection and nights filled with terror. These events move her from being a shy wife and mother of the 1960's into a woman of the 1990's that accepts the ghosts in her home and is finally vindicated when other family members finally confess thier own encounters.

This intimate sharing really touched my heart since that is much of my own experience with a haunting.

Definitely a great read! Almost 300 pages.

Has anyone read Grave's End by Elaine Mercado??? While reading Ghosts on 87th Lane I felt that it was very similar to Ms. Mercado's story. The actual paranormal experiences were not the same, but the experiences/life situations were oddly similar (i won't go in to detail because I don't want to ruin either story for readers).
I typically enjoy books like these, but I almost felt like this story was a copy cat which made it less enjoyable for me. So, If you haven't read Grave's End this book is a decent read.

Hands down, this is one of the least entertaining or convincing 'true haunting' stories I have ever picked up. I was highly disappointed. If the author is in fact not completely fabricating the entire book (which seems likely, considering that her seemingly overactive attention to details recalled from 30 years ago smacks of lies), the so-called paranormal events are easily dismissed when considering the addled source of information. The book is mostly a diary concerning lost scissors and umbrellas. I regret paying money for it.

I love a good ghost story, but it was the subtext to this particular one that kept me fascinated. No, the 'hauntings' aren't very dazzling, but if you read it as a study in oppressed emotion being projected on to the house the 'emoter' lives in, it's unputdownable. Without once writing it in those terms, you realise the author is a woman furious with the way she's been treated by friends and family and is unconciously perceiving very normal events as 'para-'. It haunts her ironing board for heaven's sake.! This would make a great little movie. Anyone interested in female psychology of the mid 20th century should have a read, even if you don't belive in ghosts per se.

If you have a passion for true-life ghost stories (as I do), I highly recommend this book. The author has a tale of a 30+ years haunting to tell that is truly creepy. And she tells it in most readable style. She has an engaging, self-aware, humorous writing style that really draws the reader into her both head and into her emotions, which makes the events she recounts seem very immediate even though some of them happened a long time ago.

In recent years, I've read many books like this one (many self-published; this one is not, and it shows), and the vast majority of them are frustrating reads, not only because they are often poorly written and loaded with grammatical and typographical errors, but because they provide minimal details/history about the victims of the hauntings under discussion. But I'm always curious (okay, nosy) about the back stories of the people involved in these hauntings, so I really appreciated the depth with which the author treated her family interactions regarding the hauntings, especially her husband's stubborn silence.

I also appreciated that this was a real BOOK -- not just a sliver of a book with wide margins and huge type, as so many of these types of books are -- and that it didn't stint on describing even repetitive events, because the author's response to these wasn't always the same as the years progressed.

After finishing the book, I did still have some questions (for instance, did her husband stop working nights in 1980 or 1982? She cited both years for that -- and what happened to her cat, Murray?), So I do think this book would have benefited from more careful editing. But that is just a minor complaint. Overall, this book is well worth reading.

This book not only bored me to tears but irritated the hell out of me! Cannot recommend to anyone unless you feel like yawning the entire time you are reading one unexciting account after another of every time over nearly 40 years that she has not just lived with ghosts in her home but put up with all that entails. Now I have read more than my fair share of these kind of books due to having experienced it myself and I have to be honest with you, you DO NOT stick around to see what else is going to happen to you! You run as fast as you can and get out of there even if that means renting a place that's smaller, less nice, people (including her husband) maybe GASP!! thinking she is nuts, blah..blah..blah.. all her excuses she used for staying. (and to make it worse she still lives there today!)
Now when this also involves physical harm to yourself (and this is when she had very young children in the home with no guarantee it wouldn't happen to them also!!)well none of those excuses stand up to scrutiny do they? I honestly don't want to call the woman a liar but hey these ghostly encounters she supposedly has suffered from for so long gave her a good reason to write a book, market it as something readable and sell it to all of us! Nice way to make some cash!
I wish I had not wasted my time or my money.

This is a truly terrible book. I love "it happened to me" ghost stories. I will buy almost anything with "ghost" in the title and own hundreds, so I have read the good and the bad, and this book is the worst of the lot. The writing is tedious and repetitive. The author spends as much time carping on her husband and family for not sharing her opinions as talking about her ghostly experiences. As for the experiences, there may be a few genuinely creepy ones in there, but they get bogged down by so much unnecessary detail about every little thing that happens to her throughout her day, every coincidence, every misplaced item or creak in the floor, every disagreement she has with her husband, that you'd hardly notice. Everything that happens is, as she describes it, a sign that someone or something is out to make her life miserable. If ever a book needed an editor, this is it.

I don't know if anything spooky ever did happen in that house; maybe it did. But I know I would have been better off buying something, almost anything, else.