Mysterious Beauty: Living With The Paranormal In The Hudson Valley

by Matthews

Overview

Mysterious Beauty: Living with the Paranormal in the Hudson Valley begins by providing a brief but thorough brief survey of the unique natural and cultural history of paranormal experience in the Hudson Valley region, including Native and early colonial reports. It then profiles select individuals whose lives have been touched by the paranormal, either as experiencers, investigators, or both. This isn't a book for tourists or a field guide, but rather detailed survey of individuals who, by virtue of their history and place, have become accustomed to living with extraordinary experiences and/or encounters with the paranormal. From ghosts to aliens, Bigfoot to ancient ceremonial sites, time displacements and spiritual visions, the testimony of witnesses and investigators speak of mysteries encountered in the legendary, wonderous beautiful landscapes of the Hudson Valley in New York.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642377941
Publisher:	Gatekeeper Press
Publication date:	09/22/2019
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Dr CS Matthews has studied paranormal experiences and reports for over 4 decades, has advanced degrees in Religious Studies and American Cultural Studies and is an ardent environmentalist. She lives in the beautifully haunted Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State where she teaches at local colleges and works for a prominent non-profit organization. She has been a journalist and has also published poetry, short stories, academic papers and a textbook on New Religious Movements.

Editorial Reviews

2020-10-22
A history book offers a comprehensive survey of supernatural events in New York’s Hudson Valley.

This substantial work by Matthews takes a broad-spectrum look at the wide variety of paranormal stories that have come out of the Hudson Valley, an area of 7,200 square miles surrounding the Hudson River, extending over 315 miles from the outskirts of New York City to the Adirondacks. For thousands of years in that area, the author points out, “haunted structures, strange lights in the sky and mysterious creatures in the forests are almost taken for granted, or at least the stories are.” The region, bordered by “the Catskills in the west, the Taconic range to the east, the Shawangunks running up from the south and west, and the Adirondacks at the northern edge,” is thickly forested and gnarled with ancient rock formations. The land has been populated by humans for millennia, from the Lenape, Mohican, and “Haudenosaunee (Iroquois)” to the European settlers whose New World towns and industries are immortalized in the Hudson Valley stories of Washington Irving. Matthews sees Irving’s tales as “absolutely foundational in understanding how this region came to be seen, not only by the rest of the United States, indeed, perhaps the world, but also how residents of the Valley came to see themselves.” Consequently, the vivid and enjoyable stories gathered in these pages range far beyond Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and its Headless Horseman. Readers encounter inquisitive extraterrestrials, menacing little people of various kinds, ravenous Native spirits, and of course the king of cryptozoology, Bigfoot (“It was definitely not a bear,” reports one witness, “because of how it was walking”). Throughout all this, Matthews perfectly matches impressive research with a born fieldworker’s ear for the evocative personal interview. Nowhere in these accounts is there either condescension or credulity. Instead, each anecdotal thread is given the serious treatment that makes every chapter thrillingly involving.

An encyclopedic and immensely entertaining history of the Hudson Valley’s long otherworldly tradition.

Kirkus Reviews