SCOTTISH SPECTRES by Dane Love
Robert Hale - October 2001
ISBN: 0709067496 - Paperback
Nonfiction, Supernatural

Reviewed by Rachel A Hyde, MyShelf.com
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As the nights start drawing in and the leaves start falling it is a fine time to draw the curtains, put your feet up and relax with a good book on…ghosts! A fascination for the supernatural seems almost universal and increases rather than fades away the more we know about the world around us. Perhaps the supernatural is the last bastion of the unknown, the last place on our personal knowledge where the caption "here be dragons" could be said to the sum total of our understanding. It is therefore hardly surprising that, having already produced one volume of ghost sightings Dane Love has followed it up with another.

The chapters group the tales under such headings as Holy Spirits, Haunted Hotels, White Ladies and Weird Places and dipping in at random will pull up many gems from Scotland's turbulent past. Read about the Great Lafayette's last trick in Edinburgh's Festival Theater in 1911, Lizzie;s daring deeds to marry the man she loved at Castle Cary, Grangemuir House in Fife with its sad tale of the life and death of Buff Barefoot and most tantalising of all the bizarre story of Miss Vining and Natalie at the White Dove Hotel in Aberdeen. Here are ghosts with a message, the wicked and the cruel, poltergeists, timeslips and ghosts of the famous all gathered together from old books, magazines, newspapers, guide books and in many cases from actual eyewitnesses. They are told succinctly and without flowery or gothic language that might make them sound suspect although a few might have benefited being told at greater length if they make good stories. What makes the tales so compelling is the fact that most of them are very modern and with a few exceptions have been seen by ordinary people and these are contrasted against the older, more embroidered accounts that have grown in the telling.

This might have been the sort of book to just sit down and read if the stories had been longer and "padded out" but to do this would have resulted in a loss of verisimilitude and lacked conviction. As it is this is a compelling case indeed for the existence of the "unseen world" as well as being entertaining to read and good for dipping into at random if it lies on the coffee table.