Haunted Asheville [Paperback]

Joshua P. Warren (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 173 pages
• Publisher: Shadowbox Pubns; 1ST edition (September 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0964937026
• ISBN-13: 978-0964937024
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,922,562 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joshua P. Warren is a world-renowned paranormal investigator who currently appears on the Discovery Channel series "X-Ops" and hosts a regional radio show, "Speaking of Strange." He has also been regularly featured on TLC, the Travel Channel, and the History Channel. As president of his research team, L.E.M.U.R., Warren uses scientific methods to document unexplainable activity. He wrote the best-selling Haunted Asheville, which refers to his home city in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and How to Hunt Ghosts. His articles have been published internationally, and he has been covered by such mainstream periodicals as Southern Living, Delta Sky, FATE, New Woman, The New York Times, and FHM.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining Guidebook to Asheville Apparitions, February 22, 2004

By 

William R. Hancock (Travelers Rest, S.C. United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Haunted Asheville (Paperback)

Asheville, NC, is a beautiful place. It is larger and more sophisticated than the hills-'n-hollers locales to the west, moving towards the Smokies (and is certainly more Cosmopolitan than the fictional "Mayberry" of Andy and Opie mystique), yet it
refuses...for the time being...to give up that "small town" ambience and friendliness it still possesses in exchange for "big-city cynical cool". Much of the famous charm still remains.
Some quirkiness, too. Asheville is the only place where I have ever seen...at one location and in one single building...a combination funeral home and taxidermy shop.
And Asheville has its ghosts. The Pink Lady of the Grove Park Inn has long-term regional renown, and since the internet spreads information around so thoroughly and quickly, her reputation is undoubtedly more widespread now. She has probably gone "national' by now and is "up there' in prominence with South Carolina's "Grey Man", Chicago's "Resurrection Mary", and a few others.
In "Haunted Asheville", local resident Joshua P. Warren (a dedicated ghosthunter/paranormalist and writer) has done a good job of covering the traditions and over-the-years sighting accounts of this intriguing phantom. Through his own scientific researches and the accumulative weight of the witness testimony (plus the reliability of that testimony), it is a pretty safe bet that there IS a "pink lady" haunt at Grove Park...and likely some others.
The one annoying aspect to this puzzle-in-pink is the curious lack of anything substantial as to a HISTORICITY for the haunting. It is SAID that this was a young woman who either fell, or jumped (or was pushed or thrown?) from several floors up into the open Palm Court of the inn...."sometime in the 1920s". Well WHEN? 1924? 1927? 1929? And what was her name? And where was she from? Or did this happen in the 1930s instead? Surely there must have been newspaper coverage, police reports,a coroners' report, death certificate, hotel records? SOMETHING?
Asheville, even then, was NOT "Possum Holler". It had a city and county governmental structure (for which read "bureaucrats"...and bureacracy LIVES for PAPERWORK), and it had news media. And believe me, if a well-heeled young woman (and the Grove Park Inn is NOT a cheap flophouse) took a header into the Palm Court, it WOULD make news! So why can't some kind of "hard data" be found here? Surely it exists somewhere.
But let's not fault Joshua P. Warren on this, though. His book is a "reading tour" of Asheville ghost haunts (always did love that particular pun). It isn't an in-depth examination of the Pink Lady. He covers what he needs to cover within the set scope of his book and does it well. Somebody NEEDS to try digging into the background story of this haunting, to be sure, but that wasn't Warren's brief for "Haunted Asheville".
From Grove Park we go to the "Battle mansion",the old WLOS television offices/studios and learn about "Alice",the resident hanger-on there. We also encounter murder and apparitional "fixation" at the Battery Park Hotel, suicide and more fixation at "Helen's Bridge", a truly disturbing story about mass graves, disrespecting disregard of the dead at the Erwin Middle School site (and the consequences there-of), the story of the haunting of the Reed House (Now the Biltmore Village Inn...an absolutely GORGEOUS bed & breakfast, whose website doesn't seem to mention the more permanent "guests"), then we encounter ghost(?) photos at the L.B.Jackson Building and at the old Zealandia mansion property , and also get treated to an eye-opening account of a terrifying nocturnal visit by a ghost to the Buncombe County Jail one night in 1908 that set many of those then incarcerated onto the path of renewed religious fervor and a determination to henceforth walk the "straight and narrow" path of righteousness.
And it is this last account that brings us back to the Pink Lady problem stated earlier. Warren's account here is taken from several articles from 1908 from the Asheville Gazette News. Names are there. Times. Offenses.Job descriptions. Everything.
If coverage of something like this can be culled from 1908 sources, why can't the identity and circumstances of the Pink Lady death plunge at the Grove Park Inn be uncovered? Food for thought.
All in all this is a good book by Joshua Warren. Regional ghost books are everywhere, especially in tourist locales. Nancy Roberts and Nancy Rhine have made a fortune off of them. Troy Taylor as well. Warren's book is as good as these mentioned and is an interesting, fun read. Going to Asheville? Read up here for the best lowdown on the spook set. Just looking to pass the time? Curl up with this. You could do worse.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but it doesn't offer much info, May 23, 2010

By 

C. E. Lednum "rosebyanyother" (Asheville, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Haunted Asheville (Paperback)

I live in Asheville and was looking forward to reading this and learning more about the ghost stories about the area. I was lead to believe that the book was going to take a more in-depth look at the stories and their origins, but it really didn't offer much information. I understand that it is difficult to get more information on stories that are that old and passed down through local folklore, but I was still disappointed since that was what I expected to get. But where it lacks in ghost history, it did offer a lot in history of various buildings and such in Asheville. I really enjoyed learning about the old pauper graveyard and some of the origins of some of the landmarks in the area. I also found that 90% of the photos really didn't have anything to offer -- most were just generic photos of people or places, and a few were sort of fake ghost photos. He didn't try to pass those off as real, but it didn't really say anything about them, so it was just sort of weird.

So to summarize, it offered a nice basic overview of the local ghost stories, but if you are looking to this book for more in-depth learning about any of those stories, you will be disappointed.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The reading of this book has become a "Halloween" tradition., November 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Haunted Asheville (Paperback)

This book is a wonderfully written, thorougly entertaining book of great ghost stories. The stories are told in a very compelling, "Page-Turning" way. The first time I read the book I finished it during a 2 hour flight. It is reread around the time of Halloween at my home and has become a "tradition". We love the book!