Noted ghost hunter Hans Holzer died last week-he made a fortune hunting non-existent ghosts.
I wonder how long before ome “psychic” channles Hans?
I saw this guy several times on TV-he never seemed to find anything.
Anyway, I hope he’s haunting someplace, now!
I read some of his books when I was a teen.
Entertaining hooey, & 70s fare.
Back in the 1960s, he had an article in the Sunday Supplements about researching who The Three Magi were. I read it as a kid and was impressed.
Years later in a used-book shop, I came across a book he had written on the subject, expanding the article to full length. I was appalled at the shoddy research and low caliber of the reasoning. Holzer obviously drew his conclusions first, then slanted his investigations and arguments to get to that destination. I suspect that his ghost books are about on the same level, although I’ve never read them.
Entertaining writer though, and I suspect he believed his own work.
He wrote a ton of poorly-researched nonsense in “Gothic Ghosts” (published during the 1970s) about a local house that is STILL being referenced by other sources. The house in question was built/owned by a family my mother and grandmother had known well, the correct information was then (and still is) very easy to obtain first-hand locally, and he still had pretty much all of it wrong.
There is at least one prominent local researcher of hauntings who is pretty much doing nothing more than repeating Holzer’s nonsense about the house verbatim, complete with mistakes about the genealogy of the family in question. This has a lot of local folks upset, especially in a suburb known for its multi-generation families, active historical society, and long collective memory.