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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  (Oct. 1, 2005)

Novelist and Ghost Investigator Tamara Thorne Unites with Other Leading Ghost Hunters to Produce Encyclopedia of Haunted Places: Ghostly Locales From Around the World

Inland Empire horror writer and ghost hunter Tamara Thorne contributes her paranormal investigation notes and expertise on haunted hot spots to the first book written by dozens of paranormal investigators from around the globe.

INLAND EMPIRE, California, September 30, 2005 – There are haunted homes, restaurants, battlefields, cemeteries, inns, castles, and ghost towns in every corner of the globe. Though spirits and specters are often the fodder for frightening local legends, there are people who actually go looking for ghosts – they’re the paranormal investigators. The Encyclopedia of Haunted Places: Ghostly Locales From Around the World is the first book to be written by scores of these investigators. The Encyclopedia includes ghost hunters’ investigation notes from some of the world’s most notable haunts and more obscure locales that only regional investigators would know about. Tamara Thorne has contributed multiple articles about findings in California and the west, based on her experiences while researching for her novels, and sometimes as part of an investigative team helping people with paranormal problems.

California locations Thorne wrote up for the encyclopedia include La Purisma Mission in Lompoc, and the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge haunting. She also did the photography for La Purisima and for Calico Ghost Town. The latter was written up by her associate, Bill Cook. 

Tamara sets most of her ghostly novels in California and is an expert on the ghosts of the Inland Empire, San Diego, and the central coast. She’s also had experience with more northerly ghosts. 

For the encyclopedia, Thorne also photographed and wrote up the Jerome Grand Hotel, in Arizona. The Grand began its life in the 1920’s as a mining company hospital and was considered haunted from the beginning.  After being closed for nearly 40 years, it reopened a decade ago as a very haunted hotel, the inspiration for her upcoming novel.

Thorne personally investigated New Mexico’s St. James Hotel haunting in Cimarron and has included it in the encyclopedia, as well as a Santa Fe-based tale of La Llorona – the weeping woman often associated with El Dia de los Muertos all over the southwest.

Fans of HBO’s Deadwood will enjoy Thorne’s report on the Bullock Hotel in South Dakota.  Sheriff Seth Bullock, it seems, still keeps a watchful eye on things in Deadwood.

“Tamara Thorne is committed to exploring paranormal phenomena,” said Jeff Belanger, founder of Ghostvillage.com and editor and compiler for the Encyclopedia of Haunted Places. “Her contributions to this project were integral in making this book the successful venture that it was. Paranormal investigators from around the world came together to write about the haunted locations they know best.”

“Ghost hunting” is one of the fastest growing fields of study in the world today. Families are taking haunted and historic ghost tours in cities around the world, and individuals who are interested in the paranormal are coming together to investigate reported ghostly activity using both scientific and esoteric means. People are talking about ghosts and many want to learn more and see the phenomenon for themselves. To look for ghosts and spirits is to touch history. It’s a quest for tangible evidence of life after death.

“I’ve been hooked on haunts and western folklore all my life, and I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing ghost stories or telling tall tales to scare other kids.  Now I get to write scary stories and investigate real-life anomalies full-time.  My experience as a fiction writer makes me very aware of the fraud, intentional and accidental, in the paranormal world and I like to use my bull detector to help separate the hokum from possible hauntings.  That is, unless I’m writing fiction, then I just want to make you shiver and look nervously over your shoulder now and then!”

About Tamara Thorne

A well-known horror writer for nearly fifteen years, Thorne bases her horror fiction in fact and often mixes in healthy dollops of humor and a pinch of bad puns.  Her novels  include Thunder Road (set in a mythical version of Calico Ghost Town, CA), Bad Things (based loosely on Redlands, CA), Moonfall (inspired by Oak Glen, CA), Haunted, The Forgotten, Candle Bay, and The Sorority Trilogy (all set along California’s scenic central coast), and Eternity, which draws from Northern California’s Mt. Shasta folklore.  Her upcoming novel, Brimstone, contains more bumps in the night than the Haunted Mansion.  She has appeared in The Devil’s Wine poetry anthology along with Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and Peter Straub, and is notorious for a risqué short story called “Good Vibrations,” in the anthology, Dark Seductions.

Thorne continues to write fiction, (the California Missions will be the subject of an upcoming novel),  and is working on a non-fiction book about her paranormal experiences.  In her spare time, she and her husband are often off staking out haunts with their associates at southern-California based Ghost University.   Tamara may also be heard on the nationally syndicated paranormal talk show, MagickMind, interviewing the famous and the infamous in the paranormal world twice every week.

Upcoming Events:

Tamara will join Lost Angeles authors Peter Atkins, Glen Hirshberg, and Robert Masello to perform the Rolling Darkness Review on October 31^st  at the Mystery & Imagination Bookstore, Glendale, CA .  See http://www.glenhirshberg.com/appearances/rd05.html for more information on this event 

Thorne will return to the Pacific Northwest, (the site of one her first novels), November 12^th-13^th  as guest speaker and emcee for AGHOST’s  Ghost Hunters Getaway this year in haunted Port Townsend, just across the bay from Seattle, Washington. 

About the Encyclopedia of Haunted Places
The Encyclopedia of Haunted Places: Ghostly Locales From Around the World (ISBN: 1-56414-799-1, pages: 360, price: $19.99) is published by New Page Books (www.newpagebooks.com). The book features over 250 haunted locations from the United States, Canada, Europe, Oceania, Asia, and the Middle East. The book also includes a region-by-region directory of contact information for the various paranormal investigators whose work was featured in the book. The Encyclopedia is a haunted travel guide, a ghost hunter directory, and a repository of ghostly legends. The book is available at Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon.com, and many other booksellers.

Contact:

Tamara Thorne

tamara@tamarathorne.com

www.tamarathorne.com www.hauntster.net

www.magickmind.net  www.grimmacres.com

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