Varla Ventura, fan favorite on Huffington Post’s Weird News, frequent guest on Coast to Coast, and bestselling author of The Book of the Bizarre and Beyond Bizarre, introduces a new Weiser Books Collection of forgotten crypto-classics. Magical Creatures is a hair-raising herd of affordable digital editions, curated with Varla’s affectionate and unerring eye for the fantastic.

Written anonymously in 1900, at a time when many were becoming familiar with the table raps and ectoplasmic visitations of spirits from the beyond, this is the story of a series of seances that took place in San Francisco, California. The author asserts that these seances were well attended, but not by the Victorian parlor women as one might suspect. Rather they were crowded with some of the highest-profile residents of San Francisco, among them the mayor, the chief-of-police, and even non other than famous tycoon William Randolph Hearst. What did they reveal? Read on to find out!