Robert Ripley (1890–1949)

I must have read this at least 10 times in my youth. Unlike later Believe it or Not Books, this one contains a lot of text as well as pictures. I believe this is where I first read about the awful Aztec sacrifices and my all time favorite--the Crystal Skull of Doom, which I will NEVER mock. If you see a copy of this one, grab it. It will give you some fun (and a few creepy) hours.

The usual collection of strange and interesting tales; this edition has a heavy rotation of stories from the Islamic world, for some reason. Also quite a few stories about botched executions.

This particular edition (which is a reprint of an earlier, 1962, work) seems to have fewer of the suspend-disbelief entries that some of the later series have. Also noteworthy is that this volume has quite a few family crest and city-seal entries. Better than the average run of Ripley.

Each of these spine-chilling tales of ghosts, goblins, and ghouls is absolutely, one hundred percent true. Would you believe that a ghost would leave a map to a fifty-million-dollar silver mine? Is it possible that love could bring a dead woman back to life? Could a skeleton shoot its own murderer?

Every one of these stories may seem totally beyond belief, yet they actually happened. In a book featuring sixteen eerie stories, nine spooky plays and 20 pages of ghostly cartoons, the eminent show more American cartoonist and entrepreneur, Robert Ripley's legacy of eccentricity survives. Believe it or Not!

To be perfectly honest, I didn't know that much about Robert Ripley before I read this book. I basically recognized his name and knew that he was a newspaper columnist who specialized in strange and unusual facts. Then, several weeks ago, Mareena and I watched a television documentary about the life of Robert Ripley and the creation of Ripley's Believe it or Not! as a worldwide phenomenon. I asked Mareena to see if she could find any Ripley's Believe it or Not! books and she did; I've received two books already, and two more books are coming soon.

I have to say that this book was thoroughly enjoyable. The ghost stories and plays are all purported to be true and are based on factually historical events. In my opinion, all these stories were absolutely amazing and so interesting.

Actually, none of the stories were tremendously detailed; they were just basically abrievated accounts of odd or inexplicable occurrences. The only section that I had a slight problem with were the plays - only because I didn't really understand how that particular style would properly portray what happened. Overall, I loved reading this book and give it an A! show less