Customer Reviews

13 Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey

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

 

 

I have been reading and re-reading Ms. Windham's books since I was a child, beginning with 13 Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey. That one was fabulous and this one is just as scary. A word of caution - do not read any of the stories right before you go to bed, or be sure to leave a light on if you do! Being a ghost story "purist", as in I tend to only really enjoy those based on eyewitness or earwitness accounts, the stories included in this volume rate right at the top!

i read this book about 15 years ago, and it just so happened i live in the same city as a few of them happened{a.k.a. the one about the train and the little girl entitled "Stains on the Masoleum"}.i can tell you the photoi was not in ANY way doctored, those stains are there to this very day, and it is an extremely creepy and at the same odd time, peaceful, place to walk past, or shall i say, run past, cause the first time i read the story then walked by the masoleum, i didnt exactly set up camp there. a very good, amazingly detailed book.

This book was very entertaining because it entertwined real accounts of ghostly and spiritual happenings that are part of Tennessee's history with the beautiful storytelling of Kathryn Windham. My children love it.

For a long time I have avoided this series of books because I just didn't understand the Jeffrey part of the titles. I still don't really understand Jeffrey but I can now see why this series is so popular.

Kathryn Windham is an excellent storyteller and I very much enjoyed most of the stories in this book. This book contains accounts from all over the Volunteer State so if you happen to be a native of Tennessee you will probably be familiar with at least a few of these ghosts. Being a long time fan of ghost books, many of the stories that the author relates in this book are indeed very familiar to me but considering the original date of publication this is probably one of the earliest books to relate these tales.

Many of the stories included contain chilling accounts of eerie experiences that the author collected from the people who actually experienced an encounter with the ghost in question. One of these witnesses is actually related to me in a distant sort of way and this eyewitness documentation is always a great plus for a book of this nature. On the other hand, the author couldn't resist including a few old legends that can't be documented and have very little to do with ghosts in the first place. She also couldn't seem to resist using one chapter that she had already published in another book which is an irritating form of double-dipping that causes the reader to pay for the same story twice.

Still, most of the stories were quite interesting and I very much enjoyed the author's storytelling skill. If the author had replaced a couple of the old legends with some stories of modern haunts this would have been a superb ghost book. Even with some disappointing stories this is a very good book and I may just have to be on the lookout for the other books in the Jeffrey series.