All her life the novelist Kate Christie had been haunted by apparitions of the dead. She felt the coming of disaster and death. She was forced to share the sufferings of the psychically disturbed, and to be host to those who had died violent deaths. She neither wanted nor welcomed any of this; she was possessed against her will. Terrified and exasperated by her experiences she at last asked herself, “Why should it happen to me?” Originally published in 1965, Apparitions: An Autobiographical Study in Parapsychology was her answer.

At one level the book is the retrospective narrative of a woman’s encounter with psychic and occult phenomena in the settings of her home and family and friends, through her travels, the war years and her life as a writer; but at another level it is the actual and painful day-to-day process of self-analysis.