Encountering Ghosts: Eyewitness Accounts

Gr 3–5—In comic book format, each of these volumes re-creates eight or nine reported encounters with aliens, spectral figures, or cryptids. Though done by different artists, the pictures have a uniformly rough, sketchy look throughout, and the page design is unusually busy and cluttered looking. Direct quotes from eyewitnesses, printed in a different color, are mixed in with the invented dialogue. However, series title notwithstanding, those quotes are not only rare, they add little, being mostly generic comments such as "Let's get out of here!" or "Look, the doe's skull is flattened." Each incident ends with an invitation for readers to decide for themselves whether it actually happened, but no real evidence is presented either way; each volume even includes a cautionary note that eyewitness accounts "cannot be proven true or false." Weak competition for the equivalent volumes in Jennifer Rivkin's "Mysterious Monsters" (Rosen) series.