Tim Weisberg and I have had our book Haunted Objects in a vault for the last few years. Despite multiple attempts to crack that safe, it seemed the book would never be republished. Until now.

Tim and I are proud to announce the official rerelease of one of our most successful books, updated where needed and unchanged in all the places that matter.

It’s a book full of stories with a story of its own…Now, enjoy the book you, the audience, have asked us to resurrect; you no longer need to steal it.

Here’s a bit from the new introduction.

In January of 2023, I had my last copy of Haunted Objects swiped during an author event. I got up to speak about how to tell a true ghost story, and when I came back there was a twenty-dollar bill on the table. It wasn’t until later, when I was packing up, that I discovered the book missing and made the connection. It was odd, but profitable. I had purchased it used for a little over two dollars online.

That was not the first incident like that. There are new copies of the old book in a warehouse that nobody can locate. The building isn’t missing, the boxes containing them are stored away, forgotten, like the end scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, although I can say without reservation no one’s face ever melted after reading Haunted Objects. I tried with no success to track them down a few years ago, but endless phone calls came up empty. I began buying old copies online and selling them for a bit of a profit at events, and every time I bought one, people would snatch it up and thank me for it. “It’s used and only in okay condition,” I would say, but they would literally outbid each other to get that copy. When I would reference it, people would get angry I did not one with me. When talking about it, both Tim and I would have listeners demand the publisher reissue it.

That is just part of the weird history of the book.

Like many of my first books, I came to be the co-author of Haunted Objects as a consolation. My friend and prolific author Jeff Belanger was approached by the original publisher with the idea, and he declined. He suggested me. At the time, I had a new baby, two jobs, and was already starting to tire of writing ghost books. I had a lack of schedule and spark, so I suggested I bring my good friend Tim Weisberg in. Together we could nail this project. His professionalism and intelligence would be the perfect fit. A little over three years from the original approach, the book was out.

Tim and I were not overly impressed with the look of it. The outside was amazing, but the inside left a lot to be desired. We are very different people, but we share a respect for what we do in the paranormal and literary world, and the design was just too flashy. We wanted the stories to do the heavy lifting. We were not fans of the splashy layout, the random pictures of zombie women, and the unexplained hands reaching across the page. Other people must have felt the same way, for the book pretty much floundered on release. The reviews were mixed, and Tim and I hit the circuit hard to promote it, but there was something about it that just did not connect with people.  Within only a few years it went into remainder, and we bought as many copies as we could from the publisher at the time. The company than went bankrupt and sold off its titles to other companies and the one that bought ours said we could have it back.

Could we have been cursed by the very idea we had looked to write about? Probably not. It was more a case of aligning ourselves with a publisher who was on their way out and who did not quite know what to do with us. They had made their mark publishing books about stamp collecting and quilting. We had always joked that the Amityville case (featured in Chapter 15) had left us open to dark forces, and often times when we would be interviewed about that story there would be technical issues, but it was more mishandling than mystic force. At least that’s what we told ourselves.

We are both proud of what we created, and even working on it now, I see why I was drawn to get it down the way we did. One thing I have learned over the course of breathing life back into these tales, is that I approach a ghost story differently than I did then, but you can see where I was headed. In 2012, the wave of supernatural and paranormal reality shows were at their height. Okay, that means a book about ghostly tales should do well in the market. Except there were too many out there, and if you were not on a television show (they even tried to make a pilot with Tim and I tracking down spooky items), it was harder to get an audience. That’s the answer that is always given at least. There was something else at work though. Reality television had caused people to seek out real ghost books filled with evidence and proof. There became a clear line between urban legends and spooky stories, and the two did not mix well.

Haunted Objects is a celebration of both, moving in between and holding both up together. People were not as open to that back then. Tim and I have worked in this field long enough to see the landscape change. In the last few years, just as the rights to book came back to us, people were beginning to appreciate those blurred lines. They were going back to allowing folklore to be part of today’s hauntings. I have seen this only speed up in the last few years with social media creating content that revives tales of phantom hitchhikers and cursed bridges. People still want to see night-vision clips of groups walking through famously haunted sites, but they also want their stories of mysterious figures, random appearances, and unexplained lights in the forest. They want to be creeped out more, and they are allowing the shadows they heard about when they were younger to chill them again. They no longer crave an answer but can allow awe and mystery.

People are not demanding proof anymore, maybe because it can be so easily faked. A bit of evidence causes your defenses to go up, but a story of a shadow knocking on a door unsettles you. There is something primal about it. I see it in the faces of people when I go out and tell my stories. They lean closer whenever the rumors are mixed with experiences and served with a little history.

We are also not in a rush to put every supernatural element into a neat category. A place like Highgate Cemetery can be haunted by ghosts or ghouls or vampires; just give us the story. This makes Haunted Objects, where in Chapter 11 we give you an urban legend before jumping to an unexplained mystery before retelling a famous haunting, something people can play in for a while. Don’t like the story of the haunted ring, just wait until you hear about Bloody Mary. Tired of that story about the Crying Boy, you need to hear the one about the shadow man who woke my daughter up.

On the technical side, there were some decisions to be made. Both and Tim and I are no longer married, but we decided to allow aspects of the stories involving them to remain. The last chapter about eBay seems quaint now. Social media was not what it is, and there are more haunted objects switching hands in more ways than ever before. We kept it in though; it is a snapshot of that time. We have also done our best to confirm that the haunted museums and websites mentioned still exist while hesitating to include new ones. The notable exception is the Haunted Antique Shop and Paranormal Museum in DeLand, Florida, mainly because it’s such a damn cool place and some of the pictures in this edition are from there.

Left out was the glossary. This was not our idea to begin with, but they were popular in ghost books back in the day. I am not sure Tim and I would have agreed with their definitions if given editorial permission of that section at the time. Left out as well was the online resource section. Both of these felt like dinosaurs of an age past. Just ask Alexa or Suri if you want to learn about spooky online.

Kept in are our writing styles, both of which have shifted in the last decade. If you are one of those people who understands voice, it is probably clear who wrote what chapters. If the sentences are long and rambling, that would be me. I did not edit them much for this edition, although I added grammar that might make it easier to digest. I guess this book is a snapshot of us as well. We lost many of the pictures from the original but recreated as many as we could, and original contributors searched around old flash drives and CDs trying to help us out. We’ve added new ones as well that are related to keep the eye entertained as you read, so we hope you’ll allow us that.

We also updated some of the stories where needed. It would be hard to talk about Robert the Doll without telling what he’s been up to since or to leave out how the ghost of Ronnie Defeo keeps popping his head up. So much of what these stories are about is how these rings and pictures and tools impacted those who experienced the unexplained with them, and that story is not always a clean break. Sometimes the ghost story keeps going.

Now, enjoy the book you, the audience, have asked us to resurrect; you no longer need to steal it.

Check out Christopher Balzano’s books.

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