A Field Guide to Common Ghosts - Softcover

Loewen, G V

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1038344204 ISBN 13: 9781038344205

Publisher: FriesenPress, 2025

Synopsis

What if the ghosts said to walk among us aren't just the stuff of old tales, but part of our shared human story?

For over fifteen years, social philosopher G.V. Loewen has traveled through rural landscapes, sat with elders, and collected hundreds of firsthand accounts of encounters with the otherworldly. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork and narrative research into human anxieties, mortality, and the afterlife-as well as chance encounters with both the earthly and the potentially unearthly-Loewen blends personal experience, empirical observation, and philosophical insight to take readers on a journey through the unseen corners of our world and the curious beings said to inhabit them.

In this unique compendium, you'll explore the most common categories of supposed spirits, their reported intentions toward the living, and what these tales reveal about our deepest fears and desires. Yet beyond curiosity, Loewen uses these accounts as a serious lens on human consciousness itself: why do stories of the spirit world persist across cultures? What can they teach us about life, death, and the meanings we make of both?

At once accessible and intellectually rigorous, engaging and unsettling, A Field Guide to Common Ghosts is more than a simple catalogue of spectral phenomena. It invites readers to step boldly into the shared space of imagination and ask not only what might lie beyond the veil, but what it truly means to be alive.

About this title

About the Author

G.V. Loewen is a social philosopher and the author of over sixty books on ethics, religion, education, aesthetics, and social theory, as well as works of metaphysical adventure fiction. Across a twenty-five-year academic career, he served as a professor in the study of religion, focusing on belief, mortality, and the search for meaning. His scholarship has been recognized with over $100,000 in academic grants and awards, and his work on the irrational is cited in Webster's reference series. For more than a decade, Loewen has conducted extensive field research into the human encounter with fear, death, and the unknown. He continues to explore these themes both in non-fiction and fiction, weaving cultural archetypes and existential inquiry into his writing.

Edition details

• Publisher: FriesenPress
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1038344204
• ISBN 13: 9781038344205
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 152