Customer Reviews

Haunted Asheville

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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!

One of the best books on the paranormal and ghosts that I've ever read. I'm not sure where the other "reviewer" was coming from, but the information in Warren's book is first rate and detailed. I've been to one of his annual Paranormal Conferences held each January at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville where the Pink Lady ghost appears, and the weekend was great. If people are expecting hokey fake pictures of ghosts that are made with a computer graphics program, then this book isn't for them. If they want great information, a scientific viewpoint combined with great storytelling, and a down-to-earth approach to unknown phenomena, then by all means get a copy of this and Warren's other books. Highly recommended.

This book is a wonderful collection of stories and investigations from haunted locations in Asheville NC. The beautiful Grove Park Inn receives the most time in the book and tells the story about the now famous Pink Lady. The book also takes you to different places in Asheville and the surrounding areas and tells you about the ghosts that reside there. This is not one of the ghost books that tells you old ghost stories that seem to be unrealistic, or extremely embellished. This book is in depth, informative, and much more amazing than any other book on ghosts I have ever read. Except no imitations. I have seen other books that have recently been published using a similar view of a few of the stories included in Haunted Asheville, but none compare to this amazing book. Thanks Joshua P. Warren for making this wonderful book. And be sure to get your hands on a copy of his book slated for 2003, "How to Hunt Ghosts, a Practical Guide" this should be the number one ghost book ever published

I purchased the book to read about the Grove Park Inn Pink Lady, because I had a ghost experience at my stay there. The stories were great but towards the end of the book was slow. But I enjoyed it.

After my own visit at the Grove Park Inn from the Pink Lady, the main ghost story in this book, I was eager to hear more. The group that I was with had 3 visits from the apparition, and she really piqued my curiosity. As soon as I got back from my trip I aquired Mr. Warren's book, expecting to learn every detail, since he had done the original scientific investigations. I was very disappointed. I learned more from the elevator operators than I did from his book. While I understand that photographing ghosts is nearly impossible, his website does has some photos that should have been included in this "updated" version. The story of the Pink Lady was lacking, and although I didn't know the other stories he included, I assume that they are lacking as well, considering the depth of the stories provided.
The photos that were included in the book were primarily of Mr. Warren and his team, posing with their equiment. Even these photos are of poor quality, being dark black and whites. The 165 pages are widely spaced in a large type, with about a quarter of them being the bad photos. You hardly get your money's worth.

If you grew up in Asheville you've heard these stories before,in fact the mostly famously told story is about 'Helen's Bridge/Zealandia Castle' which so many individuals have told that story in so many variations that it's practically a farce.The pink lady is supposedly true and I've heard this transparent story many times,but the ghost has been rarely seen.In fact the history of the Pink Lady that Grove Park Inn is so proud of is used to market the place with no more class than a cheap tourist attraction within an overpriced resort.Think about it, the cover of the book originally had a digitally designed Pink Lady with Grove Park Inn on the cover-Asheville's most expensive and oldest hotel has a ghost in the main inn...sure that kind of advertising isn't going to attract some naive individual to come stay at some pricey hotel in room 545 in hopes of seeing a ghost.Asheville is considered to be a beautiful place by many(which it is),some consider it to be an artsy/cultured city,but regardless Asheville has been recognized by it's citizens as a tourist attracted city that's grown over the past 20 years and Josh Warren just used what information he could find to make a book and jack up the tourism rate.The guy's a joke he used the same approach when he wrote the fictional book 'The Evil In Asheville' which boasts on the cover a picture of the Zealandia Castle (which was torn down and re-built utilizing some of the original stone as a mansion)and yet the story takes place in Asheville....how unexpected.Like I said this book was meant to reel in tourists,retold with semi-accurate information.Unfortunately,old-timey mountain folklore tales on areas in north carolina such as The Devil's Tramping Ground or The Brown Mountain Lights may leave people questioning these legends but the stories never change.