'Ghost Excavator' by John Sabol

This book presented a really interesting avenue of legitimizing the field of exploring haunt sites by treating them as you would an achaeoligical excavation site. He discusses the parameters of doing both a horizontal and vertical excavation and then using re-enactment as a trigger for manifestation. I really like his theories and have heard numerous accounts that respond to this format. It answers the number of re-enactors who witness haunts, the situations where one family may manifest a haunting, but the next home owner does not- or, for that matter why one individual (reliable) gets active responses, while another does not. I was quite intrigued by the theory, presentation and context. I really think that the man is on to something and might have opened the door to a valid resource for research funding that the scientific community is completely ignoring.

On the down side. The man is downright acronym happy and, in this book, it seems as though he was positively desperate to create an acronym that would get popularized. It ended up making his theoretical presentation a bit painful at times. Luckily many of the acronyms created a word that meant what all the initials meant- such as H.A.U.N.T. alas don't ask me what it stood for. It was irritating and slowed down the reading. I also felt he tried too hard to stay within academia speak - though I suspect that this was possibly due to the chance that this would become a thesis presentation *for* funding. ( I could be wrong, but I call them like I see them). Being familiar with the bandying of large vocabulary, I was able to wade through it, but I could see it easily loosing another or many other readers even thought he theory itself is delicious. I'm in the process of reading his next book 'Ghost Speak' in the hopes that he got over this urge. So far it seems he may have, its much more readable and I haven't seen an acronym yet- but the night is young!

I give this babe 3 out of 5 *'s - only because the theory holds value, the writing tried so hard to be impressive that it was unimpressive.

My favorite term out of the book? Ethnoarcheoghostological. (24 letters.... so close)