Details
Rent Haunting Museums
Author:
Format: Quality Paperback
Publisher: Forge
Published: Apr 2009
Genre: History - General
Retail Price: $21.99
Pages: 272
Synopsis
The spectacularly successful move A Night at the Museum was a fantastic look at the off-hours wonders of the American Museum of Natural History. However, some of the real behind-the-scenes stories are more fantastic than anything a screenwriter could dream up. Haunting Museums covers these overlooked bits of history including curses, mistaken dinosaurs, conspiracy plots of the founding fathers, spectral evidence of the afterlife, and other unsettling matters on full display.
Contents include: The Carnegie Sauropods, Or Bring Me the Head of Apatosaurus Louisae – the story of a dinosaur on display for close to a half a century with the wrong head.
What's on that Broad Stripe with Those Bright Stars? – the quizzical mark on the flag that is known as the Star Spangled banner.
The 1897 Living Eskimo Exhibit – where living people were put on display and turned over to the taxidermist for "preservation' after they died
Man-eaters at the Museum: The Lions That Stopped a Railroad – the story of the Maneless lions made legendary by the movie the Ghost in the Darkness
So Where is Amelia Earhart? – the exhibit at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum of the most famous missing aviatrix of all time.
Along with many other entertaining and fantastic stories.
Reviews
This title is a bit misleading. One would ***ume its about haunted museums, but the book really encompasses interesting exhibits in different museums. Some are much more interesting than others, but the book is more a grab bag of odds and ends from all over. There is a chapter on the man eating lions from Africa, one on cursed gem stones, one dealing with what happened to Amelia Earhart. The author actually seems to be an editor here because the different chapters all have different authors doing the research, so the writing is a mixed bag. Some chapters are a bit on the dry and boring side while others are quite entertaining the one about the lions was especially so. This is more a book for those looking for odd history trivia than those looking for ghost stories also it is placed in the ghost section on Booksfree, which makes the title even more misleading. For history buffs its a go, for those looking for scares not so much.