TheHairbrush and the Shoe

A hairbrush vanished. The piano played. A bed moved out from the wall. But when a workman was pushed and hissed at by something invisible on the stairs, Jeanne Stanton began to take the idea of a ghost seriously.

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When a workman is pushed and hissed at by something invisible on the
stairs of her family’s 150-year-old townhouse, Jeanne Stanton must
confront the possibility that a ghost inhabits. She proceeds in the way
any former Harvard Business School case writer would: she embarks upon a
rigorous search for proof of the ghost’s existence and identity,
exploring the literature and lore of ghosts; the practices of mediums,
psychics, and “ghost busters;” and the various attempts that have been
made over the decades to verify ghostly sounds and sights through
scientific methods. After visits to a psychic provide insights but not
proof, Stanton enters the equally mysterious realms of physics and
neurology, hoping science has answers.









Notables encountered during her research efforts include Henry James,
Arthur Conan Doyle, Oliver Sacks, and Sigmund Freud, the latter a
colleague of her home’s original owner. Wry and witty, Stanton takes
time out to laugh at her own futile attempts at ghost detection—spending
a sleepless night in an allegedly haunted bedroom, creeping along the
edges of rooms in search of cold spots—along the way. Determined to get
to the bottom of the ghost business, Stanton wavers between skepticism
and belief, searching for definitive evidence—and almost failing to find
it. Almost.