Halloween is just days away, and there's nothing like a good spine-tingling tale to help you get your spook on. GPP's new book, Haunted U.S. Battlefields: Ghosts, Hauntings, and Eerie Events from America's Fields of Honor, has 25 stories that will leave you and the kiddos shivering. Recently, I sat down with author Mary Beth Crain to discuss her fascinating look at the spirits and otherworldly entities believed to inhabit America's legendary fields of war.

Why do so many soldiers seem to hang around battlefields after death?

According to paranormal research, ghosts seem to be more prevalent at sites involving a sudden and/or violent death. There are a number of proposed reasons for this. The spirit may be disoriented, especially if it belonged to a young person who was very attached to life. It may not realize that it’s dead. It would undoubtedly have unfinished business—messages to get to the living, or loved ones it wanted to see again. A battlefield ghost may be seeking revenge, one more chance to get back at the enemy. And let’s not forget that battles were also high points in men’s lives, and many ghosts seem to want to relive them, over and over.

What's your favorite haunted battlefield story?

Wow. I have a lot of them, but I guess my favorite concerns the dapper Confederate General from Louisiana, Pierre Gustave Toutant de Beauregard, who lost the Battle of Shiloh due to a dumb miscalculation, and never forgave himself. His ghost has reportedly been seen and heard by many people at his old New Orleans home, now the historic Beauregard-Keyes House, moaning “Shiloh! Shiloh!” and wandering the halls. But the wildest part of the Beauregard haunting is the fact that since the General’s death in 1893, the home’s residents—and others—have reported witnessing a phantom midnight re-enactment of the Battle of Shiloh, complete with misty landscape, horses, soldiers, booming cannons, the whole nine yards—in the ballroom!

Did you have any brushes with ghosts while working on the book?

I don’t know if this counts as a ghostly encounter, but it occurred at around 2 a.m., when I was writing the chapter on my favorite Civil War personage, General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who won the critical Battle of Little Round Top and was supposedly aided by the ghost of George Washington. As I was working at my computer, the chapter suddenly started printing out by itself. Swear to God! And then, a few minutes later, my Chihuahua, Truman, started growling in the bedroom and backing up, like something or someone was coming toward him. He kept barking at thin air, and I had a suspicion that old Chamberlain was paying me a courtly visit, in appreciation, maybe?