I only read this book to get it off the shelf, it was a gift from someone. It was very elementary and it reminded me of the haunted bus tours you can take in some cities--iffy and not really any substance, however, there was some minor historical value. 207 pages ( )

I'm a sucker for all things spooky and weird unless that something is Pee-wee Herman who is just too darn spooky and weird for my liking. So when I came across this creepy cover while perusing through books online my curiosity was whetted enough to open the wallet and splash the cash.
A lot of effort went into the design of Hell House. Those eyes on the cover are actually two red rubies plastic orbs sunken into the book cover itself. The cover is made to resemble wood (although it's very thick cardboard) and the center part with the skull is all glossy and smooth to the touch. The effort didn't stop there though as the pages of the book are of excellent quality made of paper, each page sepia colored to give an old style look, that's obviously a cut above the average; only my lack of knowledge on different types of paper stops me doing it justice by labeling it with its correct term.
It's all well and good for a book to have great presentation but unless you just want it as some book candy for your shelf it needs to have some substance inside also. Thankfully, Hell House wasn't all looks and no substance otherwise it may well have called itself Kim Kardashian. Where it is found lacking though is in the originality of the content. As someone with an interest in the supernatural who has read numerous books of this type I found not a single haunting to be original to me. They're all famous cases that can be found in multiple other books of this ilk such as Flight 401, the Moving Coffins of Barbados, the Amityville House etc. To its credit the authors did try taking on a different approach, to give the subjects an air of freshness, by categorizing the hauntings by country and basing each chapter upon that country.
No factual book about hauntings would be complete without accompanying pictures of those hauntings for if a place is haunted surely there will be photographic evidence of such, right? Well, one would think so but there's only one ghost photo and that's of the infamous 'Brown Lady of Raynham Hall' which is considered to be a fake done by double exposure of the film (to me the lady on the stairs looks like a statue of the Virgin Mary so that would be my guess as to what was used for the double exposure). And the really odd part...the Brown Lady isn't one of the cases explored in the book! Instead of genuine pictures of strange phenomena there are pictures of the places involved in the cases instead. So, for instance, the odd happenings on Flight 401 are accompanied by a picture of an airplane.
Even with its faults this is still a good book to pick up and pass a spare hour or two with although I am probably swayed slightly by its appearance as if it was just a regular paperback I wouldn't have been as impressed. It would work well for someone who has a fleeting, or is just starting to gain, interest in ghosts and hauntings but you won't find much new material if you're seasoned in this genre.
I liked it though. ( )

I enjoyed these stories. I have read many similar books and seem to come across the same stories over and over sometimes, but this one actually had some that I had not read. Hell House was the creepiest house in this book with the most horrible, tragic history. I can't even imagine living in a place where these types of things used to happen! ( )