Ghosts Among Us: True Stories of Spirit Encounters
Leslie Rule is the daughter of bestselling true crime author Ann Rule. Her definitive research and crisply written prose revealed in "Ghosts Among Us" are characteristics of her mother's exhaustive efforts in comprehensively covering the true crime scene by communicating her information in a manner both folksy and readable.
"Ghosts Among Us" marks the author as an important pioneer in a fascinating and rapidly evolving field of parapsychology. The numbers of skeptics, some of whom sought to ridicule the topic of ghosts, have sharply diminished through the efforts of authors such as Leslie Rule, who have demonstrated that many credible people have had encounters with beings in situations that cannot be explained through traditional human analysis.
Having been born and raised in Seattle, it is fitting for Rule to launch her exploration at the colorful Pike Place Outdoor Market. Located in downtown Seattle, the market attracts not only scores of people from the Pacific Northwest and throughout the rest of the world; explorations reveal that ghosts have been known to visit as well. Numerous reports of such visits by scores of individuals from disparate walks of life have been related about such appearances.
Rule's extensive research effort took her to all parts of America from Washington to upstate New York and into Canada. As well as reporting on numerous cases, she provides photos of some of the more interesting hotels, restaurants, and mansions where apparitions were seen. An element of her effort that readers should greatly appreciate is that, in addition to researching the cases thoroughly, she invites interested individuals to follow up on their own. She provides address and website information, as well as mentioning names of individuals involved at the various locations discussed.
While conceding that she had never encountered an experience like the individuals she interviewed, who reported clear views of ghostly apparitions; she reports that at one site she received a tug on the shoulder. The two women who were accompanying Leslie were too far away to have touched her. The contact was and remains unexplained. In another instance she heard sounds of laughter while traversing stairs in the darkness of a hotel at a late hour. Leslie later learned that there was no apparent human activity at that time and that the laughter was a common occurrence during late hours.
A common thread of Rule's efforts revealed that the appearances of the beings observed frequently lived at the locations where the sightings occurred. The belief is that their spirits extend beyond their human lives. In one instance a short, jolly, white-haired woman, greeted a man at a bed and breakfast. When she offered to make him breakfast he declined, feeling somewhat eerie about the meeting. Shortly afterward he encountered the woman who ran the establishment, who told him calmly that the woman he met was her deceased mother, who made frequent appearances to guests.
My interest was seized by one particularly interesting account near the end of the book, the activities at the old Lemp Mansion in St. Louis. It was once the opulent family home of the famous Lemp family of local brewery fame and is now in operation as a bed and breakfast as well as a restaurant. A ghost haunts not only the establishment, but nearby neighbors, especially those living next door. The object of interest is called Monkey Boy, believed to be the spirit of a deformed child trapped in the building's attic. He is often seen through a window by next door neighbors.
One of the most fascinating revelations of Rule's book is the story of famous Philadelphia forensic sculptor Frank Bender. He has supplied the FBI and numerous American police agencies with sculptures of victims in instances where corpses found long after their death need to be identified. She recounts the incident when Bender, with very little to work with, provided uncannily accurate facial details of a woman who had been killed by her husband with assistance from the victim's sister. The man had taken out a large life insurance policy on his ultimate victim. The murderers believed they had succeeded until Bender provided the necessary information to determine that there had been a homicide and the body discovered was that of the victim. While Bender explains his uncanny detail work in the frequent face of at best scant supportive physical data as intuition, Rule wonders if something more is not involved, in that ghosts have been known to have worked from the great beyond to provide information as well as communicate verbally in certain situations.
Rule's book harkens back to the successful "Unsolved Mysteries" program narrated by Robert Stack. That show provided a slant that was both reportorial as well as folksy, attempting to take viewers into the world of the paranormal and the individuals reporting their experiences with rich and vivid details. The same applies to the journey Leslie Rule takes her readers on in "Ghosts Among Us."
William Hare
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