BOOK MEMORIES: DANIEL COHEN

Beginning as early as elementary school I found myself obsessed with mysteries and the unknown. While most kids were checking out books on sports heroes and dinosaurs, I was searching for anything dark and creepy. Every time I visited the school library you could find me at the card catalog looking up Ghosts, Bigfoot, Vampires, Bermuda Triangle, Loch Ness Monster, U.F.O.'s, E.S.P., Mummies...etc.
One thing you could count on when looking up books on any of these subjects was the author Daniel Cohen.
Daniel Cohen is an American non-fiction writer who has produced over one-hundred books, mainly for young audiences. Cohen is best known for his paperbacks about UFOs, ghosts, psychic phenomena, cryptozoology, and the occult. Though Cohen is a self-described skeptic and onetime member of CSICOP,(Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) his books on paranormal phenomena take a more light-hearted, open-minded stance and tend to avoid dogmatic debunking. (Wikipedia).



Here is a list of his supernatural/mystery titles:

America's Very Own Ghosts 1985
America's Very Own Monsters 1982
The Beheaded Freshman and Other Nasty Rumors 1993
Bigfoot: America's Number One Monster 1982
Ceremonial Magic 1979
Civil War Ghosts 1999
A Close Look at Close Encounters 1981
Creatures from UFOs 1978
Cults 1994
Dangerous Ghosts 1996
Dealing with the Devil 1979
The Encyclopedia of Ghosts 1984
The Encyclopedia of Monsters 1982
ESP: The New Technology 1986
Everything You Need to Know About Monsters and Still Be Able to Get to Sleep 1981
Famous Curses 1979
Frauds, Hoaxes, and Swindles 1979
The Ghost of Elvis and Other Celebrity Spirits 1994
Ghostly Animals 1977
Ghostly Tales of Love & Revenge 1992
Ghostly Terrors 1981
Ghosts of the Deep 1993
The Ghosts of War 1990
The Great Airship Mystery: A UFO of the 1890s 1981
Great Ghosts 1990
Great Mistakes 1979
The Headless Roommate and Other Tales of Terror 1980
Horror in the Movies 1982
How To Test Your ESP 1982
Into the Darkness: Nineteen Tales for Telling After Midnight 1994
The Manhattan Project 1999
Masters of Horror 1984
Missing!: Stories of Strange Disappearances 1979
Monster Dinosaur 1983
Monster Hunting Today 1983
Monsters You Never Heard Of 1980
The Mummy's Curse: 101 of the World's Strangest Mysteries 1994
Mysteries of the World 1979
Phantom Animals 1991
Phone Call from a Ghost: Strange Tales from Modern America 1988
Prophets of Doom: The Millennium Edition 1999
Railway Ghosts and Highway Horrors 1991
Raising the Dead 1997
Real Ghosts 1977
Real Magic 1982
Real Vampires 1995
The Restless Dead: Ghostly Tales from Around the World 1984
Science Fiction's Greatest Monsters 1980
Southern Fried Rat & Other Gruesome Tales 1983
The Tomb Robbers 1980
UFOs: The Third Wave 1988
Werewolves 1996
The World of UFOs 1978
The World's Most Famous Ghosts 1978
Young Ghosts 1978

To say the least I contributed to running every one of his books in the library ragged. The school library had a great selection to begin with.
Nowadays I have stacks of similar themed books shelved in my studio but I still grab a Daniel Cohen book often to sit and read on the toilet. When I was a kid they didn't have wonderful T.V. shows like "Ghost Hunters" or "Paranormal States" on and the best we could home for was a rare "Unsolved Mysteries" episode to creep us out. Here are some scans of some of the Daniel Cohen books I own:















If I find more of his books at the thrift stores you know I've got to buy them.

A few different years around Halloween Lincoln elementary had a storyteller named Duane Hutchinson come to our school to read ghost stories from his book. The children would fill the cafeteria and sit on the floor listening to him read. He had a book called, "A Storyteller's Ghost Stories" which had thirty two ghost stories collected from oral tradition in Nebraska and Iowa and adapted for storytelling. The book came out in 1987 and he was probably doing a school promotion but I guess since we all liked it, he kept coming back every year.

With Halloween coming up you can bet I'll be posting more ghosts and goblins posts.