Title: A Curious Presence – an Exploration of Ghosts and People Who Haunt Them
Author: Margo MacDonald
Publisher: ECW Press
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
Genres: Nonfiction, Paranormal, Contemporary
Length: 372 pages
Source: I borrowed it from the library.
Rating: 4 Stars
Blurb:
A spellbinding, inquisitive journey into the nature of the unseen for anyone as curious about the afterlife as they are about life
Hauntings happen. But why? Are they caused by ghosts, or something else? What is a ghost, anyway? After centuries of ghost-hunting by experts and amateurs alike, are we any closer to knowing?
Like many, Margo MacDonald once believed that all hauntings were the work of restless spirits, but after two decades spent engaging with firsthand accounts of paranormal encounters — and having a few of her own — she has more questions than answers.
MacDonald asks: Why are we haunted by tragedy but not by joy? If a ghost lives in a house but no one experiences it, does it make a haunting? And what does our desire to believe in ghosts say about us?
With insight and humor, A Curious Presence explores the theories that have shaped MacDonald’s understanding of hauntings and the paranormal. Told through conversations with skeptics, sensitives, parapsychologists, investigators, and haunted-house dwellers — interwoven with vivid accounts of real experiences and visits to famously haunted locations — MacDonald proposes an unsettling idea: Perhaps it isn’t the places that are haunted, but the people who move through them. Perhaps we have more in common with ghosts than we think.
Review:
The science of haunted places is as interesting as it is hazy.
I especially enjoyed the Canadian twist to this book as I’ve visited many of the sites mentioned here and even been on a few of the ghost tours the author talked about. This is a good pick for readers who want to learn more about some of the many historic places in Canada, albeit from a slightly different perspective than can be found in the average history book. In my opinion, there’s something to be said for exploring history from many points of view, including folklore and other topics that aren’t generally considered to be serious, in order to get a more well-rounded understanding of what a particular time and place were like.
There were times when I found the ghost hunts to be a little repetitive, and this is something I’m saying as a reader who normally loves this kind of storytelling. The author repeatedly switched between describing various ghost hunts they had been on and asking deeper questions about what is truly happening in these scenarios. I preferred the latter and would have liked to see even more time spent debunking hauntings that probably don’t have anything paranormal causing them as well as exploring the portion of them that deserve to be researched even more closely.
With that being said, I was intrigued by the theories the author came up with to describe what could make a place feel haunted without any actual ghosts being involved. They had some interesting ideas about other phenomena that might be responsible for all of the sensory experiences that don’t seem to have good scientific explanations for them yet. While I can’t go into detail about them in this review without sharing spoilers, they were explained well and included the author’s thoughts about what percentage of all hauntings may fit into this category.
A Curious Presence – an Exploration of Ghosts and People Who Haunt Them was a mesmerizing Halloween read.
Oooh, a non-fiction book with theories of why places feel haunted? That sounds like a really interesting read.