American history is more than just what you read in your high school textbooks.

There's a wild and weird side to America's past, filled with strange creatures, bizarre happenings, and fantastical figures. Researcher and writer Robert Damon Schneck has spent more than a decade devoted to sleuthing out these forgotten weird, grotesque, and mysterious gems of American history, like:

• The man who preached good health through blood-drinking.

• The California family driven insane by Ouija board séances, and the national panic that they ignited

• The West Virginia town named after its resident poltergeist, who was obsessed with cutting everything into crescent shapes. 

• The Antichrist-obsessed cult leader whose disciples became brutal murderers, all in the name of saving her (and the world).


You’ll also learn about homemade guillotines, magical ape-men on Mt. St. Helens, the psychic who smuggled a crystal ball into the White House, and the origins of those baffling modern bogeys, evil clowns driving vans.

These historically researched, scrupulously verified, and always shockingly true tales in this collection come from an America that lies beyond the skyscrapers, cornfields, and suburban strip malls where we make our homes—a place where monsters guard buried treasures, schoolgirls develop stigmata, and we never run out of strange things.