Thanks to NetGalley and Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd. for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.
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I'm a huge fan of Ghost Hunters, ghost stories, and anything to do with the paranormal in general, so I was very excited to be approved for this book. In reading it, I was a little disappointed in the way it translated onto paper. I understand where the book was going, but I had a hard time getting through it.

2.5 stars, rounded up to 3.

I’ve been into the paranormal all my life. I like watching shows, reading stories and all that. This one truly missed the mark for me.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the advanced reader copy. This is my honest review.

I have watched the show “Ghost Hunters” a few times. I have to say this book gave me the same thoughts when seeing the show. Not good, not bad. The book dragged a lot and overall, was just not that interesting to me. Thanks to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest thoughts. Receiving the book in this manner had no bearing on this review.

To be honest, I don't think I've seen a single episode of Ghost Hunters, and while I remain skeptical, I admit I'm a sucker for a good ghost story. It was interesting to know about the behind the scenes details and the research that goes into the investigations seen on the show, but ultimately this book wasn't about the ghosts as much as it was a info-dump, and a rather dry one at that. If you're interested in the minutiae of ghost-hunting, this will probably be a great book for you. If you want to hear some interesting stories about hauntings and ghosts, well, this might be a good book for you, but there are probably some books out there that will be a better fit.

I am grateful to NetGalley and Llewellyn Worldwide for the opportunity to read and review Elements of a Haunting.

My rating: 1 of 5 stars, did not finish.

I love ghost stories. Books, TV shows, you name it, I consume it. Unfortunately, I decided a long time ago that I didn't trust Grant Wilson and by proxy, I didn't really trust his new team of Ghost Hunters. What few episodes I did watch, I didn't really care for any of the team, and now in their book, they come off as annoying and none of their "greatest ghost stories," are really all that great.

Also, might I suggest hiring someone who actually writes for a living to write anything else for you? Rambling sentences, cliches, and some really poor phrasing just annoyed the crud out of me.

I couldn't make myself finish it.

As a huge fan of the show, when I saw this book, I had to request it. While it was a decent read, I stumbled with the less casual tone and voice of this book, as I was expecting the narrative and more casual tone of the TV show. However, once I settled into the more educational and wordy rhythm of the book, I did find it informative and fun.

I have never seen an episode of Ghost Hunters but if I do stumble across the series at some point, I will be happy to watch it. I have read many books, participated in numerous ghost walks and lived in a haunted flat in London England. While open to the possibilities, I still have a healthy skepticism largely because of the hyperbole and over dramatization that has been the stock and trade of those whose goal is to scare us.

The two authors are refreshing. I was intrigued by the background of how they ended up in the unusual profession of ghost hunting through personal experiences and how they bonded as partners on the A & E series. Their methodology is fascinating. They go in trying to find all the reasons why the “hauntings” can be explained away. They do not grab hold of the stories and urban myths that often surround these places. They look at the history but look beyond the most thrilling and chilling answers. They use equipment and science to eliminate everything that is not paranormal so that what is left is what defies explanation.

I found their techniques in dealing with the spirits when they do make contact compassionate. Rather than going right for the gory detail, they respect the feelings of the entity with whom they are dealing. They are not looking for the spectacular and therefore they get some solid results. The book is written in chapters where they look at the stories behind the location and both the living and dead people with whom they will interact. In spite of the language being a bit coarse at times, it is well written and a fascinating and quick read. It would make a good addition to your ghostly library. Four and a half purrs and two paws up.

*received for free from netgalley for honest review* pretty good read, i don't think i realyl learned much for this book about the science behind ghosts but i did get to hear some cool cases so that was still good!

I wanted to read this book because I am fascinated with ghost every since I was a kid. I remember watching the original Ghost Hunters with my parents when it first came on. Then I watched all the other paranormal shows that followed. Then when Ghost Hunters came back on with Grant and a new team, I was so excited. Brandon Alvis and Mustafa Gatollari were two of my new favorites on the show.

Now on to the review: This was a very easy book to get into and very easy to understand. You can tell both Brandon Alvis and Mustafa Gatollari very knowledgeable in their field. Even thought they were knowledgeable, they wrote the book that even the newbie could understand. I can also see others that are experts learning from this book as well. I can't to see what Brandon Alvis and Mustafa Gatollari accomplished in this field.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher letting me read and review this book.

*Thank you to Llewelyn Worldwide, Brandon Alvis, Mustafa Gatollari, and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review*

Previously published at https://www.mysteryandsuspense.com/elements-of-a-haunting/


“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what.”

― Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

I have been watching paranormal reality shows, such as Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures, for two decades. I am a huge fan of these reality shows and devour them when I have a moment to watch. I have also loved reading about ghosts and hauntings, whether the story is true or fictional. This was a fantastic book about being behind the scenes of some of the greatest episodes of Ghost Hunters, when it was on A&E.

Alvis and Gatollari begin the book with their backgrounds and what brought them into the world of the paranormal. They both suffered tragedies in their lifetime that led them to wonder about life after death and what happens when someone dies. Mustafa Gatollari talks about a house that he lived in that he believed was cursed.

According to a research firm out of Ventura, California, 8 out of 10 Americans believe in life after death. Another 9% said life after death may exist, but they were uncertain. Those are startling statistics. The authors dive into research about different belief systems associated with hauntings and their findings go back more than 100 years. The search for answers led them both to investigate the paranormal, but also to do it in a respectable way, looking for other things that may cause what is believed to be a haunting.

In Elements of a Haunting, they go behind the scenes of several popular episodes, including the “Gray Lady”, a haunted hotel and a haunted hospital. They are very honest and descriptive of what happens behind the scenes and whether they believe it is a haunting or natural elements causing the disturbances. In two of those places, it surprised them that it was a haunting rather than something else. They use old school tools and research to investigate such as data loggers and tracking changes in the environment that could cause something to seem like a haunting but had natural causes.

The style of their writing is straightforward, but there is some cursing and a lighter tone, which makes the science of the book easier to read. There are parts where it feels clunky but they write like they talk, and science becomes simple to understand. Their speech also reflects their camaraderie and friendship, which is apparent in every episode of Ghost Hunters. I enjoyed reading this, particularly about the episodes that I have seen on television, as I have always wondered what happens behind the scenes.

I've watched the TV show for a while. This book tells how the writers met and a few more details about them. I was hoping for more of a story as opposed to just a lot of information. It's for serious ghost hunters, definitely. I liked the information more than the way it was written. I received this book from Llewellyn Worldwide for a honest review.

Brandon Alvis and Mustafa Gatollari should be familiar to you if you're a big fan of the A&E show Ghost Hunters. In the new book Elements of a Haunting, these two look at six haunted locations and discuss their methods and protocols of how they gather evidence.  The places they explore are the Athenaeum in Indianapolis, the Madison Seminary in Ohio, the Worley Hospital in Texas, the Glen House in Missouri, and the Original Springs Hotel and Galena Marine Hospital in Illinois. If these sound familiar, it's because you've likely seen Alvis and Gatollari on episodes of Ghost Hunters looking at these locations.  The book includes details that they sometimes weren't able to reveal during the investigation.  The two have a classification system for ghosts and hauntings, and hope to show readers how they look seriously at paranormal studies, with the hope scientists will someday do the same.

If you're a ghost hunter, a fan of Ghost Hunters, or really would like to see the discipline taken seriously, this is a book for you.

Elements of a Haunting is available now from Llewellyn Worldwide.

There's a lot of information and interesting story but the style of writing is so dry and didn't keep my attenion.
Not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Okay, first of all, these guys are not writers. I had never heard of them or their show before (and have no intention to look it up now), but reading this was a mixture of chore and punishment, with some helpless laughter thrown in. The prose is beyond clunky ("a long, narrow hallway punctuated by rooms once inhabited by the building's many residents"; "it was her longtime dream to one day be its owner, a dream that came to fruition like so many before her."; "The hallway was quiet and dark, no indicators on our device suggesting any environmental conditions had taken place."; "The fact that Galena was spared from the Ice Age is the very reason for its existence by mere geological happenstance."; somebody leaves home "for the glamorous life of a would-be Hollywood starlet", which doesn't sound all that glamorous to me; there are "photos of the disembodied dress", whatever that may look like, and people always, ALWAYS come in "throngs"), we get some terrifyingly weird grammar ("Or Tom Rogers, so full of hope and energy to promote the hotel, but slowly seemed to lose his mind to apathy?", "Being that I was wearing a body camera, I knew I must have captured what I saw"), and while it's always fun to show that you know some Pretty Big Words, it helps to know how and when to use them... or at least employ an editor. (Also, just to get this out of the way, dear Brandon and Mustafa, "phenomena" is the fricking PLURAL, and "phenomenon" the SINGULAR FORM, NOT the other way round! Okay? Look it up! Please! This stays true even when you use the wrong word about 2,864 times.)
There are plenty of sentences that don't even make sense to me: "Many people hide under the guise of ParaUNITY in order to enlist others to participate in their self-delusion and fortify bubbles of not having their evidence challenged." So they enlist others to fortify their bubbles? Or they fortify them themselves and the others are just there for the self-delusion? How exactly DO you "fortify" a bubble? And what does that even mean, "bubbles of not having their evidence challenged"?!? HELP! Every now and then you come across phrases that read like the work of Google Translate; e.g. a mother fears that her son has died "when she stopped receiving letters from him after a nearly two-year hiatus." Huh? "The spooky stories impeded work on the building from ever happining." Wait, what? Apparently, as a ghost hunter you can expect to come across some enterprising felines, too: "there were throngs of dead pigeons whose limbs were brutally torn apart from intruding cats decorating the building's hallways". So, er, there were decorating cats? Who sported dead pigeons' limbs at one point, before having them brutally removed?

Second, nothing about this book is scientific. Nothing. It's not even close to science, even if you're flexible enough to regard stuff like astrology or homeopathy as within in the bounds of scientific thinking. What these guys did is arrange some types of "sightings" into lists they then declare as definitive and totally scientifically sound. That's kind of like a seven-year-old drawing a map of where the glitter unicorns live, and the purply shimmery unicorns, and the unicorns with wings. It doesn't *mean* anything. Not even if you happen to be a fellow hardcore unicorn freak. Brandon and Mustafa break their classification system down into "Classes", and those classes further down into sub-categories, all of which sounded like they had read a bit too much E.F. Benson... all those Grey Ladies and returning murder victims and guilty spirits. In fact, that whole Ghost Classification business felt a bit like parody to me. It's not even well thought out; you can have a "Grey Lady" in your home, or a "Murdered Apparition", or, um, a "Bound by Loved Ones", I guess. "Ooh, what's that sound? Oh, that's just our Bound by Loved Ones. It's a Class Three Restless Spirit, you see."
B&M call this "structure and protocol"; I'm tempted to call it something else entirely. I mean, one location's list of suspected hauntings includes "Possible inhuman entities that are reportedly known to shack up in hospitals." "Reportedly known"?! By whom? Is it even possible to "reportedly know" something? And isn't this more a case of "believed by some"?
The whole book could have been a funny-as-hell send-up of all those Totally True Hauntings!/Ghost Hunting 101 books out there; it's all there -- the fake-humble hubris, the It Happened To Us personal backstories straight out of Yeah Right country (be prepared to give your suspension of disbelief muscles a grueling workout), the unwavering belief in ghosties that colors everything they encounter, the whole Real Dudes chumminess of the enterprise, the home-made super-serious "scientific" lingo, the super-duper equipment, also totally "scientific" (because who can argue with "science", right?)... But of course it's all so very, very serious. They even do quotes, with footnotes, because this is a book of science. So we get treated to quotations from HP Lovecraft's The History of the Necronomicon, and the Cliffs Notes version (!) of House of the Seven Gables, and of course "Leonardo DiCaprio's character in The Departed" ("families are always rising and falling in America"). Oh dear.

As for the promised "greatest ghost stories ever told", well, nothing in here was even remotely scary (or great). It was all, "Haunting XY is supposed to go on here. Person YZ lived here in the past. We undertook some stupefyingly exhaustive research (i.e. talked to that dude or read those totally old newspapers) and came to the conclusion that without a doubt, Person YZ is causing Haunting XY." That's it! That's literally it!
To "confirm" their findings, these guys "talk" to the presumed entities, and of course those entities *answer*. It's too bad they never have anything to say. If you're willing/able to buy into this (I certainly had my problems), you're left with the uncomfortable feeling of the banality of it all. Apparently, according to those two experts here, we tend to stay around after death, and, er, that's it. We have nothing new to add, despite the fact that we've passed that final metaphysical frontier -- we stay who we were, we don't get more interesting, or earn any kind of insight or whatever, and we certainly don't have anything new to offer. If you were a doctor, you remain a doctor, and when asked you utter doctorly things. Same if you were a bore during your lifetime, or an innkeeper, or a sufragette. Because, you know, you only ever are one thing; apparently the afterlife is a place of underwhelming complexity peopled by some very simple souls. This book should be enough to put you off any ghost hunting ideas once and for all, because even if you do stumble across some undead medics or housemaids, they're guaranteed to bore you to death with their uninspired small talk from beyond.
Not the kind of scary I was looking for.

The Ghost Hunters (TV show) is definitely no Ed and Lorraine Warren, but they never really aimed to be. Elements of a Haunting allows Brandon and Mustafa (two members of the TV show) to explain, in their own words, what brought them to the paranormal and, eventually, the show. Their story shares some of the scientific methods they use and then highlights several cases that aired on the show. All in all, it was a decent read and would interest fans of the show (to a certain degree) but as someone who has read a lot of cases of hauntings, it left something to be desired. I can't fault Brandon and Mustafa for my complete lack of interest, but it was a rather bland read.

Thank you NetGalley and Llewellyn Publications for the opportunity to read an advance reading copy.

A great companion to their television show giving extra background and information. I also enjoyed how they explained their process for an investigation to try and rule out every natural cause they can before even thinking it might be something supernatural.

The first chapter of this book gives us the personal backgrounds of the two authors, Brandon and Mustafa of Ghost Hunters fame, detailing their journey to becoming paranormal investigators.

The next few chapters get all kinds of scientific, explaining different theories of just what exactly supernatural manifestations might be, cataloging the various equipment used in "ghost hunting", and finally giving us the system that the authors have come up with for classifying different types of hauntings (do you have a grey lady, a shining boy, or an elemental...).

We are then presented with half a dozen chapters each covering an investigation of a particular haunted place. Many of the places (and the investigations themselves) will be familiar for fans of Ghost Hunters (the newer version, with Grant but not Jason). The chapters give several pages of fascinating history on each place and then several more pages of (sometimes fascinating, sometimes not) details on the actual investigation.

This book will be loved by fans of the show, by people just getting into paranormal investigation, or by authors wanting a reference for writing a good ghost hunting scene.

For the most part I liked the book. There are definitely times when the authors come across as a bit condescending and other times when there too much repetition which bogs down the flow of the writing. But these things aside, the stories of the places they have visited and investigated are truly interesting and some of the theories and ideas they propose will definitely make you think.

I really wanted to like this book... It has a lot of good information and such but the writing style is a bit dry and boring.

Elements of a Haunting is a historical guide about ghost-hunting. The authors discuss their own experiences and attempt to categorise all types of hauntings.

This isn't a bad book, but the writing style left a little to be desired for me. The content was interesting, but I found it difficult to read.

Thanks to Brandon Alvis, Mustafa Gatollari, NetGalley, and Llewellyn Publications for this copy.

There are times that this book gets a little too scientific for my tastes, but overall, it's pretty fascinating. I've always loved Ghost Hunters and been heavily interested in the paranormal, so I felt this book was right up my alley. I especially enjoyed the backstories of the supposed hauntings, and the fact that both authors did everything they could, scientifically, to debunk claims on the cases they chose to feature in the book. A perfect read for this time of year. 4.5/5