A highly readable, deeply intriguing work that skilfully traces the borderline where folklore melts into what may be termed the authentically supernatural. The variety of apparitions chronicled in Mr Newman?s short but gripping work is astounding. Here are doppelgangers, poltergeists, the crisis apparition of a famous admiral, the mournful revenants of the lost gardens of Heligan, the sirens ensnaring a solitary walker on the coast near Padstow, a 17th century housemaid?s encounter with fairies (that recalls A Midsummer Night's Dream), ghostly lights, ghouls that haunt burial mounds, a disturbing story featuring the Great Beast, Aleister Crowley, and the poet Rupert Brooke, and an account of an excorcism that catches the abrupt manifestation and swift, gliding movements of a restless spirit. In no other part of Britain would one find such a disturbing and blood-chilling spectral banquet. Thomas McNeff West Country Book News
