This wasn't a terrible book, but it was not particularly well-written, nor did I find it scary.

I'll admit I'm out of the target audience (or at least target age-range) for this book, but I feel like I went in with pretty low expectations. I expected the writing to be below my level and the stories to be not exactly Stephen-King-scary, but I feel like this would have disappointed me even as a child, when I was devouring any kind of scary ghost-related book I could get my hands on.

The stories were supposed to be true, and I won't speak to that because all ghost stories are supposed to be true, that's the fun part of them, but they didn't feel real. The writing was clinical (I was not surprised to discover he wrote a lot of children's science books) and not descriptive enough to scare. It felt like the author couldn't decide whether to write it as a plain facts history of these hauntings or as a book intended to scare, and thus wavered between the two and fell short of both quite badly.

What saved this from being a total disaster was the choice of hauntings, which were well-selected and included some I had not heard of, which is always nice (the number of times I've re-read stories about the same ghosts is kind of annoying). It was a quick read, however, and introduced me to a few new stories I might track down more information on, so it was not a complete waste.