A Knock in the Attic: True Ghost Stories & Other Spine-chilling Paranormal Adventures

by John Russell

Overview

John Russell has been a highly regarded professional psychic for almost fifty years, reading for thousands of clients in over thirty countries around the world. As a paranormal investigator, he has physically experienced over eight hundred paranormal manifestations. A Knock in the Attic: True Ghost Stories & Other Spine-chilling Paranormal Adventures is his story, not only about his psychic awakening and the abundance of mind-blowing otherworldly confrontations he's experienced but also about the point at which he lost his faith and gave up on himself, his psychic gifts, and the beings on the Other Side. But they didn't give up on him.

A prequel of sorts to Russell's first book, Riding with Ghosts, Angels, and the Spirits of the Dead, A Knock in the Attic begins with his first paranormal experience when he was five years old and follows the highlights of his development as a psychic and paranormal investigator into adulthood, explaining what it's like to grow up psychic, to be inundated with real spiritual experiences, and, yes, sometimes even to question your spiritual gifts and the guidance from the Other Side.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781977239372
Publisher:	Outskirts Press, Inc.
Publication date:	02/09/2021
Pages:	172
Sales rank:	535,100
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.37(d)

Editorial Reviews

04/12/2021

Part autobiography, part engaging paranormal story-telling, John Russell pens an entertaining–at times scary, if you believe in the paranormal–account of his life as a medium. Russell insists that he first encountered a ghost at age five, when he awoke to see an older Black gentleman standing staring at him in bed. At first, young Russell believed the man to be an intruder, but when he screamed for his parents, the man vanishes into thin air. So begins Russell's many run-ins with the spirit realm. "Perhaps they would want me to try to convey messages to others for them. Perhaps they had things to tell me about myself that would prove beneficial to my own life. Perhaps they were lonely," Russell muses as to why the spirits gravitate toward him.

Russell serves up strange experiences and paranormal events with a fast pace and enough vivid detail to keep even some skeptical readers turning the pages to find out exactly how many encounters he claims with the spirit world and how he has dealt with the aftermath. Russell reports that his “gift” runs the gamut from seeing spirits to having prophetic dreams to being able to read other people's history–histories, he insists, that have not been disclosed to him and he would have no way of knowing. Russell describes his gift as likely inherited: "Several generations of my family had been both believers in and had had experiences with the paranormal."

Russell relishes building tension as he spins his tales. This is not a book readers will want to read late into the night if they are inclined to be fearful of the dark. It will put readers in the mind of television shows like Ghost Hunters or Medium in book format, or a round of entertaining ghost stories told around a campfire.

Takeaway: Readers who enjoy a good heart-racing, spooky ghost story will enjoy this collection claiming real-life encounters with the paranormal world.

Great for fans of: Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Sylvia Browne's The Other Side and Back.

Production grades Cover: B Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: B

BookLife Reviews

2022-03-09
A set of paranormal stories from the life of a psychic.

In this memoir, West Texas native Russell writes that he saw his first ghost at the age of 5, when he awoke to see a man standing in his bedroom—one who mysteriously evaporated after the author started screaming. His parents didn’t believe his story, but he says that the incident opened his eyes to a whole new plane of existence: “He was only the first of many ghosts I would come to see,” writes the author, “the harbinger of the beginning of my psychic, mediumistic, paranormal life, a life lived at the edge of the Veil which separates the seen and unseen worlds.” In this book, Russell offers accounts of some of his interactions with the spiritual realm, from his sightings of unidentified flying objects in the sky above his childhood home to his apparent ability to heal others’ ailments. He tells stories of haunted places—an attic, a stable—and haunted objects, including a toy camera that would spontaneously click its shutter. He also tells of filming a pilot for the History Channel about spirits and psychic energy surrounding the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and of meeting his hero, celebrity psychic Uri Geller. Russell’s prose has the practiced, rhetorical quality of a skilled storyteller, as in this passage, about a dog toy that has somehow escaped a grave: “There had been no digging, no evidence of any kind of disturbance of the soil whatsoever. And yet here sat that frog toy, so distinctive in appearance, having somehow been teleported through…several feet of densely packed soil.” Russell clearly expresses confidence in his spiritual and psychic perceptions, although one doesn’t get the sense that he feels the need to convince readers of their veracity; as such, skeptics will likely remain skeptical. Also, the overall tone is more like a memoir than a series of ghost stories, and some may find its lack of scares to be slightly disappointing. Still, the book offers an intriguing window into the life of someone steeped in the supernatural.

A sometimes-intriguing but low-key supernatural remembrance.

Kirkus Reviews