New Releases by Dinah Williams

Describes how reptiles and amphibians are used in delicacies and dishes around the world, including frog legs, rattlesnake chili, and turtle shell stew.

Introduces edible seafood such as sea cucumbers, sea urchins, shark meat, eels, and baby octopus, including a map showing the countries where seafood dishes are eaten.

Most haunted houses were once the scenes of gruesome events or some deep human unhappiness. Rose Hall Great House in Jamaica is no exception. The mistress of the house, Annie Palmer, began her reign of terror at 18. As a girl, her parents had relocated from Ireland to Haiti and promptly died of yellow fever, leaving Annie in the care of a Haitian nanny rumored to be a voodoo priestess. It is said that she trained Annie in the occult. After marrying John Palmer in 1780, Annie reportedly murdered him by poisoning his coffee. Thereafter, she had numerous boyfriends murdered along with two more husbands. When Annie finally died, the slaves burned all of her possessions and buried her as deep in the ground as they could. The house is still said to be haunted by “The White Witch of Rose Hall,” and the story of Annie’s haunting is the basis for over a dozen gothic novels. This nonfiction account of a haunted house along with 10 other haunted house histories will keep young readers on the edge of their seats!

What secrets are buried within the crumbling walls of old asylums for the insane? Readers will get a glimpse of what these nightmare facilities were like before the dawn of the modern era. From the wretched overcrowding of London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital (which inspired the English word bedlam), where citizens could pay a penny for the pleasure of poking “lunatics” through the hospital’s bars with sticks, to Christian Church Hospital in Kansas City where Dr. Robert Patterson beat and chained patients and performed ice-pick lobotomies—this scary book will rivet young readers while also giving them an understanding of how far mental health care has come. Eleven asylums are explored, with tales of not only what they were like but of the spirits said to still haunt them. Abandoned Insane Asylums is part of Bearport’s Scary Places series.

Do the dead tell tales? Readers will find out in this scary trip through 11 of the world’s spookiest graveyards. Among the stops: Chestnut Hill Cemetery in Rhode Island. That’s where a little girl named Mercy Brown is buried. In the late 1800s, her family was hit by tuberculosis. First, her mother and sister died. Then Mercy herself became sick and died. In desperation to save his tubercular son, her father—who had become convinced that Mercy was a vampire rising from the grave each night to suck the life blood from her sibling—dug up her body, cut out her heart and burned it, and served the ashes to her brother. Such compelling historical nonfiction will keep readers eagerly turning the pages in this macabre exploration of the world of the dead.