The Usborne Book of the Haunted World: An Underrated Spooky Gem from the Nineties

Looks like it’s party time at King Diamond’s house!

This Halloween I decided to give you something fun, a cherished relic from my nineties childhood that not many of you know about, as it was overshadowed by the impact of the more popular World of the Unknown series of Monsters, Ghosts and UFOs. The Usborne Book of the Haunted World might be one of the scariest things I brought home from a Dymocks bookseller back in the day, and some of its illustrations gave little me a few nightmares to go along with it. Usborne put out a lot of supernatural themed publishing materials in the past, and this is one of the overlooked gems in their catalogue that I haven’t seen much love for from bibliophiles online, it’s a beauty and its slim volume contains a ton of horrors from around the globe. The first thing you notice about The Usborne Book of the Haunted World is its cover, illustrated by Graham Humphreys, that draws the eye on any bookshelf for a young child. Spectres lurk behind a tattered map of the haunted planet Earth, with gothic candle holders dripping wax down their iron stems. A demonic bat looms over the proceedings, as a great header image for the book, which should be studied by publishing as a great example of book design. The makers of this tome know when to use scale and image placement with text to intrigue the reader. The illustration style is more sophisticated than the janky retro tone of The World of the Unknown - the drawings are well drafted and easy to identify as the thing you’re looking at. I particularly like the table of contents illustrations which encircle the text in a tasteful manner, giving you a sneak preview of the spookiness yet to come. The border placement is elegant and clean.

Stephen Wright did a terrific job designing this publishing marvel.

The Usborne Book of the Haunted World begins with a question, “What is the supernatural?” and proceeds to answer that question with a map full of the world’s mythic terrors. The book claims the supernatural is a broad umbrella beyond just sightings of ghosts or spirits to include strange powers and the unexplained. The book aims to fully explore the eponymous haunted world…. explaining to a target audience of children the different ways we interact with the supernatural using technology as sophisticated as cameras and pseudo-scientific as seances. Many abridged legends are collected between its covers, and for a book this slim they cover a lot of ground. The book has a large format to better accomodate its illustrations which have tiny details to really amp up the fridge-horror of it all, something you barely notice has teeth that sink into your mind long after the book is closed. You get a better look at the Amityville house later, but it’s a great introductory illustration for North America. Spook activity and mysterious events which can’t be explained around the world is what this book aims to communicate, I think it succeeds at its goals for a forty-eight page book.

The first of a double page spread which encapsulates the Haunted World.

The rest of the non-Eurocentric world countries get representation here.

The concept of haunted houses is easy enough for children to understand, although in hindsight I feel discussion of the Amityville murders is a bit heavy for a kid’s book from the nineties, it’s one of those details that stuck with me like the illustrations of ghosts that look like angry apes in the windows of the Amityville house. The cloven-hoof-marks leading across the page is a nice touch of book design, you can still read the text despite its interruption. More houses are covered, like the story of the Borley Rectory and its nun-ghost haunting, I’m pretty sure half of these hauntings have been used as the foundation of The Conjuring universe horror flicks already. I like the way the pages are arranged with smaller illustrations like the nun at the window peeking over a world map of similar hauntings. In the Haunted isles chapter there’s a thrilling tale of baby-murder where a douchebag named William Darrell seduced a maid and slaughtered the resulting infant as soon as it was born by throwing it into a fire. This is one of the darkest tales in the book, especially for small children, it sticks with you as an adult. At least douchebag Darrell was startled on his horse later on and broke his neck. Phantom animals are discussed in this book, with a story from France of a cat which appeared in photographs after it had died. I liked the bit about the French boy continuing to feed his invisible dead kitten, refusing to believe it had gone. A famous French ghost photographer captured evidence that it still lingered, which is a neat ending for this haunting. Stories of black dogs of doom follow this one, appearing before members of the Vaughn family died, On the opposite page spread we get a map of werewolves, with mini-stories including a magic belt that gave its wearer the ability to transform. This section includes a tale of a monster cat in Ireland that had to be exorcised by a priest.

Seriously, those ape-spirits in the window creeped me out as a kid.

The Usborne Book of the Haunted World likes using maps for effect.

The tale of the infamous Winchester house is rendered in exquisite detail here.

The Haunted isles section of the book has a great banshee illustration on the right.

Phantom in the photograph was one of my favourite stories in this.

World map of lycanthropy tells short stories about were-animals.

Ghosts of North America is where this book really starts feeling metal, with illustrations of bloody axes and will-o-wisp lightning over graves. Canada is also covered under its umbrella of happenings, there’s a neat story about a man who fell into Niagara Falls being saved by his dead dad, but as a kid I was always distracted by the rad imagery splashed across the page like the blood and candles accompanying a story about a haunted house that was disturbed when the new tenant threw out some bones to his peril. “North American ghouls can be particularly nasty” - that pretty much sums it up. The double spread page also has some brutal imagery like ESTHER burned into walls with matches and a spooky cat accompanying a story of the Bell Witch who poisoned it. There’s also a story about a hitchhiking ghost who leaves the jacket she borrowed from the driver folded on her grave. The ESTHER story from 1889 is pretty creepy, with a woman named Esther Cox haunted by a paranormal spectre dropping lit matches on her bed and writing threatening messages on the walls. It’s possible she faked it, says the book, but it’s pretty alarming. So far it’s been a stroll through kids’ nightmare fuel, yet The Usborne Book of the Haunted World isn’t done rustling our jimmies with scares.

This two page spread perfectly complements each side of its contents, I like it!

South America has a lot of spooky goings-on that the book also covers, including the first appearance of UFOs in the selection of scary stuff. The book explains to children what a shaman is, tribal priests who claim to communicate with spirits. There’s also the Nazca plateau’s alleged signs to spaceships which I learned about from watching Ancient Aliens, and the story of mysterious moving coffins in Haiti. On the other page we get the story of La Llorona who is called the lady in black here but the gist is still the same, she’s a weeping woman in eternal search of her children. We also get the story of a gaucho who neglects his family and his work to weave ponchos, only for a giant bird to tear into his flesh and curse him to wander the wilderness forever. Deadbeat dads are common instigators for scary stories in South America it seems. Poltergeist action is reported in Alien force, which ends with a family fleeing a spectre who scalds a woman’s arm with a boiling kettle, never to be heard from again.

Smaller details like the weeping woman among the cactuses are appreciated.

No spooky storybook is complete without some vampire stories, and The Usborne Book of the Haunted World delivers some obscure little known vampire tales among more famous ones like historical figures Vlad the Impaler being the inspiration for Dracula and Countess Elizabeth Bathory bathing in the blood of virgins. The tale of Arnold Paole is told in four panels, he was a Serbian man attacked by a vampire in Greece, he dies when a farm cart falls on him in Hungary, and he is seen haunting the village as a vampire. Over twenty vampires that Arnold killed are dismembered and burnt. In China, the tale of the headless teacher murdered by a vampire whilst his wife was imprisoned as a suspect is told, and once the head of Liu is found in the coffin grasped by the vampire, the widow is set free. Not exactly chilling to the bone as an adult, but the illustration of the vampire clutching Liu’s head in his coffin is gruesome.

Vlad the Impaler is illustrated to perfection here, probably my fave picture of him.

I always liked the details on these maps like the skeleton hand and the bat.

The Usborne Book of the Haunted World covers a lot of ground regarding the different types of spooks our titular Haunted World contains, like when Lutheran Church founder Martin Luther threw a pot of ink at a shadow of the Devil himself. Yet again the use of maps and the book design of having hands loom over the tattered parchment on the Haunted Europe page. Haunted seas and More sea ghosts explore a ton of maritime hauntings, which are brief yet chilling paragraph short stories illustrated by eye-ball commanding pictures. One story about the Octavius tells a story about a crew who were discovered freezing to death in the lower decks. The Bermuda Triangle makes its brief appearance in this book, a token nod to its mysterious naval disappearances. The tale of the Mary Celeste ends with its crew disappeared and boiled egg breakfast still on the table, I’ve never heard this story outside of this book and it was nice to hear.

I like the skeleton in the bottom left corner, he’s like a @dasharezone resident.

This section of the book covers ghost ships like the Flying Dutchman.

I adored this illustration in the bottom left of a sailor frozen solid on his ship.

This page covers the Bermuda Triangle, but I’m here for the illustration of the boat covered in ghosts in the right corner, which stuck with me as a kid reading it.

When I was a kid, there was one thing from this book that chilled me to the bone, the terrifying Chi’ang Schich, which was this walking corpse from China which had long fingernails. I later found out from the movie Mr. Vampire that this horrifying thing is called a Jiangshi and the book mistranslated the name just like how it mistranslated the word for onryo as “goryo”. The China and Japan section was the first exposure I had to these J-horror and Chinese horror concepts, before I saw The Grudge in my mid-twenties when I started seeking out horror movies instead of avoiding them. The Usborne Book of the Haunted World isn’t really scary to the eyes of an adult however it serves the purpose of introducing children to different parts of the world and their respective supernatural monsters. I was creeped out by the “Chi’ang Schich” or the Jiangshi because it was described as this hulking corpse which killed you if it breathes on you, and in the story detailed in the book you could escape if it got its long finger-nails stuck in a tree. There’s educational merit in teaching kids the different ways the Chinese and Japanese engage with their spirits, and about dragon-paths guiding the construction of pagodas. There’s another story about a haunted well where this grief-stricken husband tries to communicate with his dead wife, who is reborn as a baby daughter of a nearby farmer, and when the child turns eighteen they marry. The focus is on the half of a coin he threw into the well, but creepy age differences are creepy.

This story in the bottom of the page is a rare male onryo story in media.

This thing, the Ch’iang Schich, horrified me with just an illustration of its shadow.

The section on Battle ghosts is lavishly illustrated with a map and skulls with candles burning on them, and a spider crawling among some bloody daggers. Replayed raid tells the story of vikings doing a rerun of their raid on a Scotland abbey. What got my attention as a kid was the tale of the Nagual - which is this bird spirit thing which the Spanish fought when they were busy conquering the Aztecs. The Nagual died and the chief of the Aztecs also died without a wound on him, implying a spiritual link to this spirit creature. The map shows a variety of battle ghosts around the world, and each site is marked with little logos representing sightings of spectres where they happen.

I like the determined expression on the soldier’s face as he fights the Nagual.

The mysterious East chapter of The Usborne Book of the Haunted World is one of my favourite chapters, as it is one of the best illustrated ones, there’s so much going on in here that it’s hard to concentrate on just one story. One of the first tells children about reincarnation and the Dalai Lama, who can remember past lives to an extent where he recalls where his predecessor put his false teeth. There’s another story where a boy has a long scar on his neck, a sign of being murdered in his previous reincarnation. The tale of the tulpa is quite interesting, a being summoned from intense meditation, a French journalist took months to think him away again when he became a nuisance - but the creepiest one is the story of the ayah who haunted British ex-pats as a witch strangling a woman in her bed unless one dared to tell it to go away. There’s also this tale about a leper who got revenge against a hunter who left a blind leper sorcerer to die, returning as a tiger to maul the face of his son and caused him to die of leprosy.

Check out the guy’s scream reflected in the dagger, that’s great illustration!

This is one of the busiest pages in the book, with a lot of story packed into it.

Pyramids and pharaohs is a section of The Usborne Book of the Haunted World devoted to just that, pyramids and pharaohs. As a kid who had an Ancient Egypt obsession, later visiting the pyramids of Giza and the sphinx in my lifetime, this chapter of the book told me a lot I already knew like the story of Tutankhamen’s tomb, except for the tale of the mummy’s hand cut off by her father and reunited with the ghost of the woman it belonged to. It’s one of those old colonialism stories where a white person gets an old artefact and has to return it with magic from The Book of the Dead, there were a lot of mummies being bought and sold in the nineteenth century. I first heard this story from an old Horrible Histories book about the Egyptians, it scared me then too because it’s genuinely creepy. Another story I didn’t pay much attention to as a kid was about Dorothy Eady, who claimed to have visited Egypt in her past life being advised by Seti I, uncovering details in hieroglyphics which baffled experts.

Until I could visit Egypt firsthand, I had to get my fix through books like this.

Travel tales and Tales from the North are sections of The Usborne Book of the Haunted World I remember well, the story of Princess Amen-Ra is particularly alarming due to it being another of the book’s colonialism stories which ends badly for people who buy Egyptian artefacts. A museum bought Princess Amen-Ra’s mummy and anyone who went near it died, then some idiot thought it was a good idea to take it with him on the Titanic of all ships. How in the hell he got it into storage on one of the worst maritime disasters of all time is beyond me, but it’s especially disturbing to wonder if a mummy curse had something to do with the Titanic sinking the way it did. Tales from the North features an illustration of a dragon creature called a Lindorn to kick things up a notch, there’s a story called Mystery guest which tells the story of a party that was visited by the ghost of a woman who died in an air raid, hence her outdated clothes. Rasputin makes his appearance in The Usborne Book of the Haunted World, somebody’s gotta teach the kids about him if the grown ups won’t play their kids Boney M’s song about him. Like Vlad the Impaler’s profile, the sensational details of him being poisoned and surviving are the focus here, but this does mention his Russian political machinations.

The page with the Titanic sinking tells of people cancelling their ticket after seeing it sink in their dreams, which is a little spooky, not as spooky as most of this book.

I love the skeletons behind the map playing with trains and aeroplanes.

I like the rad disco attire of the Mystery guest story and the skulls emerging from the tape recorder, I am a simple man with simple taste in the paranormal.

The section on Spirits of Africa and Arabia is fairly text heavy, leaving much to the imagination when telling some of these stories. It covers the concept of a witch doctor, and the power they wield over their tribespeople as healers and divination practitioners. Old Man Baboon is mentioned as an evil spirit controlled by a burglar as revenge for his imprisonment. Genies are discussed in very brief detail, saying some are good and some are bad spirits, and that they appear in Aladdin. It also mentions that some genies are quite stupid and can be tricked into entering a tiny lamp. We get a neat vampire story on the next page from Arabia, where some poor sod named Abul-Hassan marries the Middle Eastern equivalent of a Nosferatu. It’s told in three panels next to a block of text, illustrating the bride Nadilla hanging out in a graveyard and rising up from her bed to drink her husband’s blood. There’s also an extended tale of living dinosaurs found in Central Africa, which aren’t really spirits as much as they are crypto-zoological phenomena. This picture bewildered me as to whether this dinosaur was supposed to be a herbivore or a carnivore, the illustrator drew it as both.

Whoever illustrated this long-necked dinosaur decided to give it fangs.

The section on Australia and New Zealand creeped me out as a kid because as an Aussie I was closer to that action than the other parts of the world mentioned in this book, the illustration of the fabled bunyip in particular haunted me. There’s no mention of Turramulli, the Giant Quinkin in this book, the scariest Dreamtime creature of all time in my opinion, but we do get a hairyman’s shadow with glowing eyes with the illustrated map of Australia and New Zealand. This chapter haunted me for years and when I got myself a new copy of The Usborne Book of the Haunted World, it was one of the first chapters I took a look at in case it still held the power to frighten. Of course my adult eyes didn't find this chapter all that frightening, besides, how scary could ghost settlers who look like Slim Dusty be? I have heard some stories from farmers about the phantom carriages that go through their house past midnight, I stayed up all night for a glimpse of such phenomena and got bugger all for my trouble, nonetheless tales of Aboriginal ghosts wandering through the kitchen at night at my mum’s friend’s place kept me from staying too late at a Halloween party just in case. Australia’s ability to scare the living daylights out of people is underrated, we’ve come up with such terrors as The Babadook to terrify on the world stage. Coupled with New Zealand we’re quite adept at coming up with either fearsome creatures or backpacker murderers torn from the headlines like Ivan Milat inspiring Wolf Creek. Of course the scariest thing about Australia at the moment is how cruel we are to refugees, locking them up in offshore detention centres like Manus Island and Nauru, whilst New Zealand gives our mistreated immigration applicants shelter from our punitive system. We’re ashamed.

That hairy-man illustration really holds up as one of the books subtler scares.

Four panels of Australian farmer horror greet you at the bottom of this page.

I won’t showcase the rest of the entire book, but I will showcase some of the more unique illustrations of The Usborne Book of the Haunted World for you readers at home. The book is long out of print and hard to get hold of in good condition, I was lucky to snag myself a hardcover copy at Abebooks for my personal library, and I cherish it as part of my childhood literary upbringing. The last few chapters, Royal and famous ghosts, Ghosts in film and fiction, and Talking to ghosts cover well-trodden ground most aficionados of the macabre are already well familiar with, although I admit being exposed to seances in a book for children leaned dangerously close to the occult which my parents forbade me from exploring - even throwing out an issue of MAD magazine which had a paper Hairbutt the Hippo ouija board inside. Henry VIII’s bloody reign is something I’m well versed in thanks to Horrible Histories, the hit musical Six explores a feminist perspective on his multiple wives during his reign including the ones he beheaded. Monster movies explores the impact of the Universal Monsters cycle, up to today's horrors with Poltergeist and Ghostbusters, for little kids that this book is aimed at it’s a decent if basic introduction to the genre. When I first read this book, I didn't go near horror movies because I thought they were too scary, but in the passage of time I’ve grown to appreciate them, as well as the holiday of Halloween. As an Australian I seldom got the lollies I was trick or treating for, but kids like me formed the foundation of Halloween in the antipodes today. I can now go see R-rated horror movies like Midsommar without getting carded for ID due to my receding hairline, and I can thank The Usborne Book of the Haunted World for getting me started with my interest in all things paranormal. I wouldn’t be the aspiring wizard I am today without this book, not everything in it frightens the same way it did when I was eight, but I can respect the high quality of illustrations it brought to the table and the premium book design Usborne put into the end product. It may be overlooked compared to the trilogy of The World of the Unknown series Usborne put out in the seventies, but this spooky gem from the nineties remains one of my favourites to dip into this spooky season. I hope you have a happy Halloween under quarantine this year, and hope you don’t disappoint any trick or treaters who have the decency to wear a mask. Peace.

The picture of ghosts hurtling out of a round globe is a bit silly to my adult eyes.

This reminds me, I still have to watch Poltergeist all the way through.

This reminds me of that excellent seance scene from The Changeling.