The supernatural has this in common with nature: you may drive it out with a pitchfork, but it will constantly come running back. At a time when science and technology are proving ambivalent in their effects and institutionalized religion is weakened by self-inflicted wounds, interest in thesupernatural is insatiable.This sweeping anthology presents material in which, touchingly, eerily, or bizarrely, the supernatural and the natural meet and ignite, illuminating our deepest anxieties, frailties, and hopes. While chiefly concerned with specific instances, it gives due weight to the views of philosophers and oflovers and lost souls. Mixing what is advanced as fact with what is offered as fiction, it takes in hauntings both malignant and benign, magic, vampires and other popular monsters, witches and fairies, the devil seeking whom he may devour, sex and the supernatural, dreams and coincidences, daemonicinfluences in art, comedies of the occult, near-death experiences and after-death expectations. The closing section sums up the war between believers and disbelievers and touches on the processes of reading and of writing about the subject.Testimonies cited are ancient and modern, drawn from East and West, from Christian, Islamic, and Buddhist sources, and range from Homer to Hardy, Pliny to Primo Levi, Apuleius to A.S. Byatt, through Rabelais, Shakespeare, Johnson, Goethe, Dickens, George Eliot, Flaubert, Kipling, Yeats, RebeccaWest, and many others, including some who, like Browning's medium, Mr Sludge, find a little cheating comparable to the china egg that prompts a hen to lay a real one. For fervent believers and sceptics alike, there can be no more magical compendium than this.