****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
For those of you expecting a book that just describes one ghost story after another connected to this famous site this isn't the book for you. This book is so much more than that. The author has obviously spent years researching Bachelors Grove and the surrounding area and that comes through on every page. I'm not from that part of the country but I found the history of the area, the first settlers who tamed it, and those who were first buried at Bachelors Grove to be extremely interesting. The amount of information in this book about all of that came as a very pleasant surprise to me because I actually did expect a book that just went from one ghost sighting to the next.This book explains, in great detail, how Bachelors Grove came to be in the first place and how it's ended up the way it is today. It's a must read for anyone interested in the site. For those of you just interested in ghost stories it has those as well but I think the author describing the evolution of the area, and the cemetery in detail before getting to the ghost stories makes them all the more interesting.The sole issue I had with the book was that Ms. Bielski did not spend much time on the Madonna of Bachelors Grove and the world famous photograph of her sitting on the base of a grave marker in the cemetery. As I said earlier, I'm not from the area, I live on the east coast. The only reason I ever heard of Bachelors Grove in the first place was because of that photograph, it's an incredibly impactful image and it's what got me interested in the cemetery in the first place. I wish Ms. Bielski had talked about it a bit more; the testing it's undergone to prove its authenticity, why she thinks she knows the identity of the woman in the photograph, etc. I thought that she touched on this subject much too briefly.That's just one minor complaint though, otherwise this book was very enjoyable and I'd urge anyone with an interest in the area or it the paranormal to add it to your collection immediately.
