Cited by the L.A. Weekly as "the culture's foremost spokesman for the psychedelic experience," Terrence McKenna is an underground legend as a brilliant raconteur, adventurer, and expert on the experiential use of mind-altering plants.

In these essays, interviews, and narrative adventures, McKenna takes us on a mesmerizing journey deep into the Amazon as well as into the hidden recesses of the human psyche and the outer limits of our culture, giving us startling visions of the past and future.

When a workman is pushed and hissed at by something invisible on the stairs of her family’s 150-year-old townhouse, Jeanne Stanton must confront the possibility that a ghost inhabits. She proceeds in the way any former Harvard Business School case writer would: she embarks upon a rigorous search for proof of the ghost’s existence and identity, exploring the literature and lore of ghosts; the practices of mediums, psychics, and “ghost busters;� and the various attempts that have been made over the decades to verify ghostly sounds and sights through scientific methods. After visits to a psychic provide insights but not proof, Stanton enters the equally mysterious realms of physics and neurology, hoping science has answers. Notables encountered during her research efforts include Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oliver Sacks, and Sigmund Freud, the latter a colleague of her home’s original owner. Wry and witty, Stanton takes time out to laugh at her own futile attempts at ghost detection—spending a sleepless night in an allegedly haunted bedroom, creeping along the edges of rooms in search of cold spots—along the way. Determined to get to the bottom of the ghost business, Stanton wavers between skepticism and belief, searching for definitive evidence—and almost failing to find it. Almost.

Writing Phantoms in the Night or ETs? was not easy for author Lorraine McAdam, and what she relates in this book might not be believed by the vast majority of people - which is why she delayed writing it for so long… Indeed, until now, only those in her close, nuclear family had known of the details of her story, which has been a lifelong one. But in her heart she eventually realised that withholding her story - of what she has now come to believe is some form of ongoing ET contact - was no longer an option. And because it seems that the world at large has moved to a more enlightened attitude towards ‘abductees’ or ‘experiencers’ who have experienced and gone through this high strangeness, loosely called ‘alien contact’, McAdam now thinks that the time is ripe to reveal her story. “This is my own simple, truthful, riveting, intriguing, and sometimes frightening account of multiple encounters, and experiences, with beings I believe originate from other worlds and, possibly, other dimensions�, she writes. “And yet I am, to all who know me, an ordinary English teacher, wife, and mother. So why me? I have no answer.�

The author's conclusions are ground-breaking - his ideas have been published in the respected Journal Of Near Death Studies.

A look inside the hospitals, asylums, and sanatoriums in which formal spectral residents refuse to move on. Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing, places of birth, and places of hope. But with all of the varying highs and lows that are experienced in these buildings, is it any wonder when echoes linger indefinitely? How about asylums, which house some of society’s worst offenders and troubled inmates, or sanatoriums, places where the mentally and physically ill find themselves trapped, even after death? Journey inside the history of these macabre settings and learn about the horrors from the past that live on in these frighteningly eerie tales from Canada, the United States, and around the world.

Carol Zaleski's book is the first objective, comprehensive survey of the mass of evidence surrounding near-death experiences: the extraordinary visions and ecstatic feelings reported by people who have survived a close brush with death. Comparing recent near-death narratives with those of a much earlier period she finds both profound similarities and striking contrasts.