Leslie - Tomes of terror: haunted bookstores and libraries

Copyright Mark Leslie Lefebvre, 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

All characters in this work are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Project Editor: Carrie Gleason

Editor: Jenny McWha

Design: Laura Boyle

Cover Design: Laura Boyle

Front Cover Image: Dreamstime/Paul Sparks

Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Leslie, Mark, 1969-, author

Tomes of terror : haunted bookstores and libraries / Mark Leslie.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

978-1-4597-2860-8 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-4597-2861-5 (pdf).-

ISBN 978-1-4597-2862-2 (epub)

1. Haunted places. 2. Ghosts. 3. Libraries--Miscellanea.

4. Bookstores--Miscellanea. I. Title.

BF1471.L48 2014 133.122 C2014-904249-3

C2014-904250-7

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

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I f you have yet to set eyes on Mark Leslie, the author of this engaging book, you are in for a surprise, maybe even a shock!

Mark is a man to mark (if I may be permitted a pun) he is very tall, dynamic, personable, knowledgeable about books and the book trade, especially books about ghosts and spirits, and very enthusiastic about life in general (and, let me add, about the afterlife as well.)

The best description of him comes from an email that he sent to me not too long ago. It includes the following self-appraisal: In a nutshell, I am an avid book lover and have been all of my life. I have always been fascinated by things that go bump in the night. (And quite terrified of them I consider myself one of the worlds biggest chickens Im afraid of the dark, afraid of the monster under my bed, the one hiding under the stairs, etc. As a parent, when my son said he thought the bogeyman was in his room, I used to hide under the covers with him and wait for my wife to come save us....) Tomes of Terror combines my two greatest loves my love of books and storytelling with my love of spooky tales.

No one could have expressed it better, which is why I am quoting his own words here, but there is another reason: we are rather alike. I too love to read books and to write and compile them, and I too am fascinated with tales of the supernatural and theories of the paranormal. When those interests (or obsessions) mix and match, they generate more questions than they do answers, and many a great story of a haunting is born along the way!

Mark has honed his style as the compiler of two collections in the field of ghost-hunting: Spooky Sudbury (2013) and Haunted Hamilton (2012). They demonstrate that he has a special feel for locale, for he subscribes to the notion that it is places (like houses, residences, and public buildings) that are the scenes of hauntings. There is a lot of literature about haunted castles, and so on, to bear him out. My own position is that in most instances of reported hauntings, whether by ghosts or poltergeists, it is people rather than places who are haunted. This was also the position of George and Iris Owen, Canadas most widely respected ghost hunters. Indeed, Iris was known to say, Parapsychology is people. Without a person present there is no ghostly presence. Perhaps it takes a person and a place to raise a ghost.

I would like to think, along with Mark, that books attract spirits and that collections of books house covens of spirits. This being so, what a remarkable undertaking is Tomes of Terror , for it allows Mark to haunt (if I may use that word) more than fifty old and new bookstores, public libraries, and college and university libraries across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, in search of accounts of ghost-like apparitions and poltergeist-like manifestations.

Here we enter into the realm of legend and tradition, folklore and urban lore, but we also enter into the domain of the personal experience of men and women who are now living. Strange events and experiences are either supernatural in nature (traditional stories or narratives) or paranormal in nature (accounts that may be described as memorates, that is, first-person recitals of what happened or what seemed to have happened.) Whatever their nature, they are, in essence, scary!

In the aisles of bookstores and the shelves and stacks of libraries, Mark has researched these supernatural stories, and he has interviewed those people who have been cursed, or blessed, with experiences of a paranormal nature. In doing so, he adds to our cache of experiences as human beings. Perhaps Mark will join me in affirming my maxim that Ghosts are good for us. They are good for us because while they may frighten us, they require us to think in terms that extend beyond the quotidian the everyday and embrace such notes as life and death, fate and destiny, fear and hope, acceptance and affirmation, belief and doubt, and grace and deliverance.

Earlier, I mentioned that if you have not yet set eyes on Mark, you should be prepared for a shock. What I had in mind is what he shared with me in an email: the fact that Mark has a unique sidekick named Barnaby a life-sized skeleton who travels with him on most of his book tours, spending a good deal of his time in the passenger seat of his car, and startling drivers all over Hamilton and Toronto. In the past couple of years, Barnaby has become a central part of Marks persona as a writer of horror and the paranormal.

If you want to see Mark and his sidekick Barnaby Bones, visit the following website: http://www.pinterest.com/markleslie/barnaby-bones/.

But dont say I didnt warn you!