"Most haunted" maybe, but by dull ghosts

The Most Haunted House in England (Time-Life Collector's Library of the Unknown)
Harry Price
Longmans, Green and Co., 1940 (Time-Life Books Reprint)

After watching The World's Scariest Ghosts Caught on Tape one Friday eveninga few weeks ago, my interest in "true ghost stories" was peaked and so I scared up this volume.

Harry Price's The Most Haunted House in England is the book about a classic haunted house, Borley Rectory, which is a staple of many of the ghost and supernatural books I read when I was younger. It is well-written in that competent British school boy fashion, with impeccable grammar, restrained wit, and conservative style.

Price explains how he was invited to explore Borley Rectory, which was built in 1863 by the Rev. Henry Bull and which had allegedly been visited by the ghost of a nun and by a spectral coach drawn by two headless men. Price details the history of the village of Borley and the tales of the haunted rectory; the legend of a nun who was buried alive at the site that would become the rectory for her illicit liaison with a monk; and spooky stories from various sources---those who lived in the house, their guests, and those invited specifically for the task of research into the hauntings.

Sadly, for its status as a classic in the genre of supernatural literature, the book is not really scary. Almost all of the activities described were of the nature of a poltergeist (or Poltergeister, as Price would have it) in the form of mysterious sounds, teleportation of small objects, movement of small objects, and, over a period of several years, the writing of messages and small marks on the walls of the house. There was surprisingly little about the spectral coach and ghostly nun, particularly seeing how these alleged phenomena were what drew Price to the house initially.

The book serves as a documentary history of the alleged haunting, and the author leaves it up to the reader to decide as to the veracity of the stories of Borley Rectory in light of all the documentary "evidence" presented. Many contemporary critics feel that Price and one of the couples who lived in the house (those to whom the mysterious messages were addressed) established this entire story as a hoax. It wouldn't surprise me.

In short, this is a high-quality reprint of a classic, if unconvincing and not very scary, early 20th century monograph on ghosts. The Time-Life Collector's Library of the Unknown is a classy series for those who are interested in the literature of the unexplained, even if only in fun, and this volume is no exception.

A decent book about an interesting man

There is a River: The Story of Edgar Cayce (Time-Life Collector's Library of the Unknown)
Thomas Sugrue
Time Life Education, 1992

I had heard of Edgar Cayce before, mainly because I shelved so many books by or about him in my years as a bookseller. It was only recently, though, as I was browsing through one of the Stranger than... books by the late Frank Edwards that I came across a brief biography of Edgar Cayce and learned more about his mysterious diagnoses given while unconscious. I remembered that I had this book, one of the Time-Life Collector's Library of the Unknown reprints, on my shelf and so I dug in.

For the most part, the prose was easy to read and written in a straightforward, familiar style, so that I felt like I was seeing the events of Cayce's life as they happened. The book begins like a normal biography, discussing early romances, jobs, family incidents, etc., with very little to indicate how strange Mr. Cayce's life would become. Around 1/3 of the way through the book, we discover, along with young Edgar, that he can memorize written materials just by sleeping on them. He also discovers that he has miraculous powers to diagnose illnesses and prescribe cures for people he has never met, all while unconscious. (In his waking life, Mr. Cayce was very modestly educated, and was as surprised as anyone at the ideas and language that came from his unconscious form.) The way that this section of the book reads, you would imagine that Cayce's cures were always successful and that skeptics were fools.

The book begins to drag after the second half, though, for a variety of reasons. First, Cayce could never actually put his powers to any real end. Every attempt to establish a multidisciplinary hospital to implement and research his unconscious revelations, as was his dream, came to an unsuccessful conclusion. This is fairly anticlimactic and does not make for a very "heroic" story. Second, one of his benefactors, a man quite interested in matters occult, began to ask Cayce more arcane questions, and so the revelations began to drift into, to me, less interesting areas-the typical new age stuff about Atlantis, reincarnation, soul mates, etc. Finally, it became more apparent to me, based on the later, more thoroughly documented cases, that Cayce's "miraculous" cures might not have been as amazing as they seemed in the earlier chapters; the earlier cures seemed more amazing simply because the way in which they were recorded and related was more "oh gosh" and less stringent. (In other words, as he gets older and more jaded, even his cures seem less special and miraculous. Maybe this was the writer's intention.)

The conclusion of the book was, for me, the worst part. It is divided into two appendix-like sections. In the first section, the author tries to systematically describe Cayce's philosophy. Boring. Too much like the Ascended Master stuff that I find hard to swallow. Maybe it is true. Maybe not. Whenever I read this stuff, I just get the feeling that I am listening to some pedantic, New England minister lecturing on matters that were expressed much more interestingly 2,000 years ago by Hindus and Buddhists. The second section in the conclusion recounts six case studies from the Cayce files, and these are interesting only for those who want to see how difficult to understand Cayce's medical diagnoses could be, due to the odd structure of his language and the outdated medical terminology.

It was a quick read, except for those two concluding sections, so if you are at all interested, I highly recommend reading it. As for what it means, though, I really have no clue. And I don't plan on re-reading it to find out, though the pretty Time-Life book will remain on my shelf as decoration.

(This review was originally written April 6, 2006.)