I recently have completed a book review for the book that I had recently finished. I read Mark Spencer's book
A Haunted Love Story: The Ghosts of the Allen House. I enjoyed the book and I enjoyed the tour that I had taken in October of the lovely Allen House in Monticello. I was enticed the buy the book and read it after the tour and after hearing about experiences the Spencer family have had while living in the Allen House. On the tour I did have a few things occur that I couldn't quite explain. I brought a new pack of batteries and they all died while I was standing outside of the church that Ladell Allen had been hospitalized in after her suicide attempt that eventually lead to her death. So, I went and purchased new batteries. I returned to the Allen House and between being in the dining room and the attic, they all died. I am guessing dud batteries? While a friend and I were in the master bedroom, the house went from like 100 degrees (not seriously, but we were sweating) because there wasn't any air circulation going on (no fans blowing, no AC unit blowing, ETC.) to like freezing cold and the curtains started moving. It wasn't like air blowing them, but it was like someone taking the edge of it and pulling it back to look out the window. I'm not sure what the explanation for that occurrence was, but I have no proof except for the audio that I have on a voice recorder where my friend and I were both kind of WTFing. I also caught a few things on my audio recorder such as laughing and the saying of "Walter", but I am still in the process of trying to debunk them and I am still revisiting the recordings.
So... I found it best fitting to do a review over this book. I have submitted this review to my Amazon account, but it is still being reviewed for it to be placed on the comments section. I found Amazon to be a fit because I never thought it would be worth while to post reviews there before, but after doing some research and reading a few articles, it seems like every review and rating helps share the things that you value in the literary world.
Anyway, with further ado here is my book review:
Spencer Sheds Light On The Question: "Why Did She Do It?"
Have you ever wondered what it was like to share
your house with ghosts? Have you even questioned if the paranormal was even a
real thing or not? In Mark Spencer’s book, A
Haunted Love Story, those questions are brought both to life and leave a
reader pondering and questioning about how they would answer those questions. Spencer
and his family moved to Monticello after he takes a job at the university.
However, Mark’s job is not the only thing that draws the Spencer family to this
area of Arkansas, but his wife finds herself fascinated and at awe with a
house--- the Allen House. They begin asking around town about the house and
everyone keeps telling them that it’s haunted and a home that they don’t want to
live in. They are also reminded that the owner will never sell it to them. Though the home is not for sale, the cards become in their favor and they find
themselves moving into a home that has not only a tragic past that everyone in
the town of Monticello knows about, but it has the original family and homeowners
still residing there.
When Mark and his family become the new owners to
the Allen House, everyone wanted to know more. Of course people in the town of
Monticello knew of word spoken by mouth and the stories of the Allen family
that had once been prominent to the town in the early and mid-1900’s, but they
wanted to see inside the home. People
would show up on their doorstep eager to look inside and eager to catch a
glimpse of the ghost of an Allen family member.
“What’s
it like to live in the Allen House?” people always asked us. They wanted to
know what we’d seen, what we’d heard, what we’d smelled, and what we’d felt.
After moving into this home not only does Mark and
his family have to adapt to the curiosity of the people in the town of
Monticello, the calls from paranormal investigators, but they had to deal with
odd encounters that begin to occur to them personally in their new home. These
encounters ranged from things simply going missing and then appearing somewhere
else, items exploding in the house, strange figures appearing, the smell of
cigars, the encounters of family member doppelgängers, and a series of other
things that simply could not be explained. Though Mark is quick to explore all
of the possibilities for explanations, he finds himself swaying between those
logical explanations and succumbing to becoming a believer that he and his
family could be sharing their home with the spirits of the original homeowners.
When the family starts to renovate the home, they
begin to unravel and piece together pieces of history and the story of the life
of the Allen family. Mark and his family begin to find old liquor bottles,
postcards, pieces of toys and old photographs. The biggest find comes from the
find that Mark finds when pulling pieces of flooring up in the attic. This is
where he begins to unravel the mystery and piece together the pieces to the
question that everyone once asked and continues to ask about the suicide of
Ladell Allen.
“Why
did she kill herself?” many people asked.
“Nobody knows,” I said
to my own tour groups. “She was divorced. Her son had died. It was the holiday season. A lot of
people get depressed around the holidays, you know. We just don’t know.” I
shrugged. I, of course, had no notion that in less than two years I would
discover one Saturday morning the answer to that question people had been
asking since 1948: “Why did Ladell do it?”
The truth is that you simply have to read this book
to find out the answer to that question. I came across this book after I had found
an interest in the Allen House. After I had learned about the architecture that
made this house so stunning to the town of Monticello, I booked a late
night tour of the home in the month of October. On this tour I learned more
about the history of the Allen family, learned about this famous love story of
Ladell Allen and “P”, viewed some of the Spencer family’s treasure finds of the
Allen House, and I also had some of my own unexplained situations on the tour.
Mark does a wonderful job of transitioning the reader from a paranormal skeptic
to questioning the possibility of paranormal existence. He also sheds light to
the mystery that revolves around the suicide of Ladell Allen and dives into
bringing to life by painting vivid scenes of
possibilities of how the events might have actually occurred in
the lifetime of Ladell and her secret lover “P”.
