The World’s Most Famous Ghosts by Daniel Cohen

This was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, just like all of Daniel Cohen’s other kiddie books on weird stuff like UFO’s, the Loch Ness Monster, Conspiracies, and whatnot. The stories are all incredibly entertaining, but they’re also educational. The part with the ghosts of the Tower of London was frightening because the actual location is real. The Berkeley Square Horror, now that got me interested. Soon after reading this book, my family made a trip to London and we made a bee line for Berkeley Square. I remember marching into the building and saying “excuse me, where’s the haunted room?” The only person there at the time wasn’t surprised; there are occasional writers and paranormalists who drop by. But she was there by herself and couldn’t let two strangers upstairs. She said “we use it to store the books, and no, there haven’t been any strange goings-on.” I bet the sight of my typical American dad, with his trucker cap, was probably the strangest “going-on” they had that day!

Abraham Lincoln’s ghost gets a chapter to himself, and it’s a rather depressing one, with or without the haunted rooms. Abe’s family wasn’t a happy one; his son William died in the White House, his wife was crazy, and his youngest son died in his teens. If you couple that with a rough childhood, a difficult adulthood, and the most stressful presidency in history, his ghost has a lot to wail about. But the ghost did show up at the right moment, when someone tried to bulldoze the White House’ famous Rose Garden.

The Winchester Ghost House is a story that always fascinated me, but I never knew what it looked like until the internet allowed me to see photos. Sarah Winchester was the heir to the Winchester rifle company, and like Abe Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd, she had two things against her; she was into spiritualism, and she was nuts! She was told by a psychic medium that her dead husband and daughter were being tortured in hell, and she’d have to build a huge house to lodge all of the ghosts killed by her husband’s rifles. I won’t spoil the rest of the story.

It seems as though these ghosts were once depressed people. Aside from the Drury Lane ghosts, they all have to do with unhappy lives. At least the Drury Lane theater ghosts are considered good luck. In New York City theaters (especially the old ones in the West Village) there are ghosts too. Don’t wear yellow or green on stage. Those used to be the color of the devil in old plays.

Bet you didn’t know that one!