The Ghosts on 87th Lane: A True Story

by M.L. Woelm

Book Overview

Once upon a time, my house was haunted. It still is. I began recording my experiences, hoping to one day share them. I kept waiting for the incidents to stop, so I'd have a logical conclusion to my... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0738710318
• ISBN13: 9780738710310
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Llewellyn Publications
• Length: 277 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The Ghosts on 87th Lane

I liked this book. I liked how the author told her story and granted in a few places it may have seemed redundant to some people but, paranormal events do not happen on command. I can understand how as a young housewife and mother being forced to move to a home that she really didn't have any choice about and how frustrated she would get over these seemingly attempts to drive her crazy. We have to remember the era that she began having her paranormal experiences. You just didn't talk about these kinds of things before the more enlightened 90's and 2000's came along. The author didn't write this book to be a novel in the normal sense. She was writing her memoires in a journalistic style not as a novel. For a first printed effort I think she did wonderfully well. It is not easy to have that first book published. I completely empthasize with her frustration that she cannot get her family to believe in what she is hearing. As a child I had a number of "imaginary playmates" myself and know how it feels to have your parents or other adults ridicule you and try to convince you there isn't anything there. I, too, went thru many nights sitting alone in my upstairs bedroom scared to death of the room next door. I slept with a Christmas candle in my room as a night light until we moved into the newer brick rancher in February of 1971 and I was fourteen years old. I knew there was something wrong in that room when my cat, who was a superior mouser, would not go into that room to catch a juicy morsel. He would wait patiently by the curtain that separated those two rooms knowing that eventually, the mouse would come in my bedroom and he would grab it. Pets aren't stupid, they know when there is something not right about a space. I felt so sorry for this poor author having to go thru all that agony of her family not believing in her. It is so easy for people to discount the paranormal even if they have experienced episodes themselves. I find this act even more reprehensible. They could at least say I've seen or heard things I don't understand rather than just out and out denying that the paranormal doesn't exist. People in this more enlightened age are lucker than this poor lady was in finding all kinds of support and investigative groups that would be willing to help her find out what was in her home. I believe that with each experience, it just opened her mind even more to paranormal possibilities and gave disencarnant spirits something to latch onto in their what I term flybys. She may have outwardly not wanted them there but inside she did which is why she kept having experiences even after supposedly "sealing" her home. If you don't "seal" yourself, you can't "seal" your surroundings. You can't just say oh I only want to be receptive to nice paranormal entities. We don't get that choice. You have to take the good with the bad and I like how the author realizes this in her later entries. She begins to understand that she is

Wonderful!

How seldom does one find a book like this! This is my favorite of all the personal hauntings that have hit the bookshelves in the past two years. What makes this book intriguing is: 1) The haunting went on for decades. 2) The author chronicles her personal struggle in learning to live with the haunting when no one else would believe her. 3) The ordinary life she describes interspersed with her nights of terror are very thought provoking--what would you do if faced with the same events? The author struggles with fear of the unknown, personal rejection and nights filled with terror. These events move her from being a shy wife and mother of the 1960's into a woman of the 1990's that accepts the ghosts in her home and is finally vindicated when other family members finally confess thier own encounters. This intimate sharing really touched my heart since that is much of my own experience with a haunting. Definitely a great read! Almost 300 pages.

Very enjoyable true-life haunting account

If you have a passion for true-life ghost stories (as I do), I highly recommend this book. The author has a tale of a 30+ years haunting to tell that is truly creepy. And she tells it in most readable style. She has an engaging, self-aware, humorous writing style that really draws the reader into her both head and into her emotions, which makes the events she recounts seem very immediate even though some of them happened a long time ago. In recent years, I've read many books like this one (many self-published; this one is not, and it shows), and the vast majority of them are frustrating reads, not only because they are often poorly written and loaded with grammatical and typographical errors, but because they provide minimal details/history about the victims of the hauntings under discussion. But I'm always curious (okay, nosy) about the back stories of the people involved in these hauntings, so I really appreciated the depth with which the author treated her family interactions regarding the hauntings, especially her husband's stubborn silence. I also appreciated that this was a real BOOK -- not just a sliver of a book with wide margins and huge type, as so many of these types of books are -- and that it didn't stint on describing even repetitive events, because the author's response to these wasn't always the same as the years progressed. After finishing the book, I did still have some questions (for instance, did her husband stop working nights in 1980 or 1982? She cited both years for that -- and what happened to her cat, Murray?), So I do think this book would have benefited from more careful editing. But that is just a minor complaint. Overall, this book is well worth reading.

A fun book

An entertaining book and a fun read. It's written as though she's telling the story rather than writing it. I kept wanting to know what was going to happen next! I bought it on a whim, and I'm glad I did.

Excellent!!!

This is a great book and very hard to put down. This a very beleivable story that I would recommend to anyone with an interest in true hauntings. Very well written and the author will keep your attention though out the whole book. Since this haunting is still in progress I do hope a second book is written in the future, I will definitely buy it.