Today on the Grave Talks, Ghostland, a conversation with Colin Dickie.

When Colin Dickie set out to write about American ghost stories and hauntings, He did not quite know what to expect.

Through his research, he dove deep into some of the most storied haunted houses,

asylums, prisons, and cities the United States has to offer. Along the way, he'd find true

dark stories of a malevolent past, along with facts that sometimes simply did not line up with reality or history.

Just how many of the infamous American haunted location stories are accurate,

and how many have a tale to tell that is much darker than we ever imagined.

Well, right. I mean, I grew up in San Jose, California,

so I grew up down the road from the Winchester Mystery

House, which was a huge component of my last book, Ghostland in American History and Haunted

places.

And I think that probably my proximity to the Winchester Mystery House, that was one of the

things that really started it, you know, sort of taking those tours as a kid, being in that crazy wild Victorian house

that seemed to go on forever and hearing those stories. The other cool thing about San Jose

is the Rosicrucian Museum, which is this crazy Egyptology museum smack in the middle of the suburbs, which is another thing.

We used to take, you know, tours like when we were, you know, school kids, we would take field trips there.

And so those two kind of weird spaces, you know, Ghostland dealt with Winchester Mystery House

and the Rosicrucian Museum

ended up in this current book in sort of ways that I wasn't exactly expecting. But those were

kind of the two kind of central poles of weirdness, I think, when I was a kid that drew me into

that kind of stuff. Did that interest continue throughout life? Was it something that kind of

re-emerged later? Or have you always been

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