Book excerpt: In this collection of true ghost stories taken from the files of Britain's renowned ghost-hunter, each case has been thoroughly verified with all available sources. Even the few striking legends which are included--each of them a meld of local tradition and hard fact--have been accorded the same painstaking personal research. O'Donnell tells of phantom buses and trains--and even a phantom plane; of the strangling oak of Nannau Woods, haunted churches, compacts with the dead; of banshees and fairies today and in old Brittany, Ireland and Wales. He also includes more of his own encounters with the supernatural: on a lonely road in Scotland, on beach and moor, and in a house filled with the hate of two dead women where, through the appearance of a ghost, O'Donnell uncovers a ghastly crime committed by mother and daughter 25 years before.--From dust jacket.