Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, August 2025
Ghostly Encounters: Terrifying True Hauntings
By Richard Estep
Visible Ink Press
43311 Joy Rd., #414
Canton, MI 48187-2075
Sept. 9, 2025, 256 pages, Paperback, U.S. $19.95
ISBN: 9781578598120
Reviewed by Brent Raynes
Author Richard Estep provides his readers with a spine-chilling collection of authenticated ghost stories from Kentucky’s notorious Waverly Hill Sanatorium to England’s most haunted house Borley Rectory, in addition to other classic cases like The Enfield Poltergeist, The Black Monk of Pontefract, to the 19th Century’s malicious poltergeist the Bell Witch of Tennessee, and many more. Estep has authored some 30 books. Many of them on the paranormal. They’ve been such titles as Dark Spirits: Monsters, Demons, and Devils; The Horrors of Fox Hollow Farm: Unraveling the History & Hauntings of a Serial Killer’s Home; Whispers in the Darkness: The Haunting of Whispers Estate; The Ghosts that Saved America: The Haunting of Fort Mifflin, and of course many others. Estep is a regular columnist for Haunted Magazine, contributes material for the Journal of Emergency Medical Services, and often appears on such television shows as Haunted Case Files, Haunted Hospitals, Paranormal 911, and Paranormal Night Shift. Born British Estep today makes his home a few miles north of Denver, Colorado, where he works as a paramedic and lives with his wife and their many adopted animals.
This book is filled with comprehensive case details, photographs and illustrations, complete with an index, bibliography, and photo sources, and personal accounts of the author’s firsthand encounters, like his several days spent at the oldest Inn in Wales, the haunted Skirrid Inn, where he and his team members spotted shadowy figures, one such “shadow figure” actually captured on video moving around a dining room, and the capture of “very clear EVP recordings.” In another instance, at Cornwall’s haunted Jamaica Inn, built back in 1750, many original rooms are said to be haunted. Estep’s wife Laura was laying by herself on a four-poster bed and felt invisible fingers stroke her ankle. Others have reported similar experiences in that same room, some even claiming to have seen the apparition of a little ghost girl said to be named Hannah. Laura also claimed that at a time where she was feeling disturbed and anxious, she felt an invisible presence reassuringly patting her shoulder. One guest in that room claimed he emerged from the bathroom to find wet footprints on the carpet circling the bed. The footprints were said to have been the size of a child’s feet. Soon afterward he allegedly checked out in a hurry.
The apparition of a man wearing an old-fashioned tricorn hat was said to have been seen many times also at the Inn, in multiple guest rooms.
Estep encourages his readers to take the next step. “It is a fine thing to sit around a fire and tell ghost stories; it is even better to experience them for yourself.”
