It is that time of year again! The leaves are changing and the weather is dramatically fluctuating between warm and astonishingly cold as Fall tries to get its footing. The perfect time to curl up under a blanket and read something eerie. If you’re looking for a good non-fiction book to read in honor of Halloween then this is the list for you.
Here are a few of the books in our collection that are excellent for this season:
Witchcraft
The devil’s disciples : makers of the Salem witchcraft trials by Peter Charles Hoffer
The specter of Salem : remembering the witch trials in nineteenth-century America by Gretchen A. Adams
Witchcraft narratives in Germany : Rothenburg 1561-1652 by Alison Rowlands
Whores of the devil : witch-hunts and witch-trials by Erik Durschmied
Witch hunters : professional prickers, unwitchers & witch finders of the Renaissance by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart
Werewolves, witches, and wandering spirits : traditional belief and folklore in early modern Europe by Kathryn A. Edwards
Ghosts
Possessions : the history and uses of haunting in the Hudson Valley by Judith Richardson
Specters of the self : thinking about ghosts and ghost-seeing in England, 1750-1920 by Shane McCorristine
The house of the seven gables, a romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The supernatural in society, culture, and history edited by Dennis D. Waskul and Marc A Eaton
Possession
Demon possession in Elizabethan England by Kathleen R. Sands
Discerning spirits : divine and demonic possession in the Middle Ages by Nancy Caciola
True Crime
Death in the air : the true story of a serial killer, the great London smog, and the strangling of a city by Kate Winkler Dawson
Death in the Haymarket : a story of Chicago, the first labor movement, and the bombing that divided gilded age America by James R. Green
Mary Jane’s ghost : the legacy of a murder in small town America by Ted Gregory
Serial killers : psychiatry, criminology, responsibility by Francesca Biagi-Chai
Jack the Ripper : the definitive history by Paul Begg
Leopold and Loeb : the crime of the century by Hal Higdon
The notorious Mrs. Clem : murder and money in the Gilded Age by Wendy Gamber
Killer on the road : violence and the American interstate by Ginger Gail Strand
Jack the Ripper and the London press by L. Perry Curtis
Death in Beijing : murder and forensic science in Republican China by Daniel S. Asen
The invention of murder : how the Victorians reveled in death and detection and created modern crime by Judith Flanders
The infamous Harry Hayward : a true account of murder and mesmerism in gilded age Minneapolis by Shawn Francis Peters
The secret poisoner : a century of murder by Linda Stratmann
A bit of everything else
The Martians are coming! : the true story of Orson Welles’ 1938 panic broadcast by Alan Gallop
The secret history of the world : as laid down by the secret societies by Mark Booth
The black death by Joseph Patrick
Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds by Charles Mackay
The great cat massacre : and other episodes in French cultural history by Robert Darnton
The secret token : myth, obsession, and the search for the lost colony of Roanoke by Andrew Lawler
Mummies, cannibals, and vampires : the history of corpse medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians by Richard Sugg
Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night by Nicholas Rogers
Spook : science tackles the afterlife by Mary Roach
Not your average zombie : rehumanizing the undead from voodoo to zombie walks by Chera Kee