The title of this book, as well as the description on the back cover, are a little misleading. While the book sounds like a comprehensive collection of New Jersey folklore, from hauntings and cryptids to German u-boats and shark attacks, it actually is mostly a summary of activities by the authors' ghost-hunting club, the New Jersey Ghost Organization.

Oh, all that stuff is in there, but it's mostly brief and lacking in detail. Only the NJGO gets much ink.

That was something of a disappointment to me when I read Folklore of the New Jersey Shore: History, the Supernatural & Beyond by father-daughter team Richard J. Kimmel and Karen E. Timper. While I enjoy a good collection of ghost stories as much as the next enthusiast, I was expecting something different, something more. After all, New Jersey has its share of legends, mysteries and even a few cryptids, such as the notorious Jersey Devil. Although the Jersey Devil is arguably the state's most famous unverified beastie, it warrants only seven paragraphs in this book.

Many of the supposed ghost stories simply relate a chapter of New Jersey history and then remark that, who knows, maybe those figures from history are still around. Or they build up anticipation but don't pay it off, such as in a brief section titled "By the Sea! By the Sea!"

You may imagine that Seaside Park is precisely equal to any other municipality in the United States of America, but the phantom tales told by the local residents are enough to make anyone reassess their thoughts a bit. Some folks who live here say these reports are not true, but there truly are unusual things happening here in Seaside Park during the moonlight hours.

While a reader would be justified in expecting a vast assortment of stories about Seaside Park, they instead are treated to a single paragraph with a vague, generic tale about a pale woman walking the beach in search of her lost husband.

The authors rely heavily on the appearance of orbs in photographs, which most people will tell you is evidence more often of dust in the air than of spectral activity. They also spend several pages on the infamous shark attacks of 1912, trying but failing to give the real historical events some sort of supernatural veneer.

The book promotes the erroneous belief that pirates often buried their treasure along the shore. While it does cite the solid example of Captain William Kidd, who likely did bury some treasure somewhere along the East Coast knowing he likely would be arrested soon, the authors make it sound fairly commonplace, which it was not.

Folklore of the New Jersey Shore includes stories of murders and suicides that a cursory Google search will show to be false. It includes outright contradictions, such as appears in a chapter on a Revolutionary War incident in Matawan. The passage notes that, in the incident in question, a British soldier was shot and killed. In the next sentence, the British demand a resident's shawl to bind the injured soldier's wound. Is he wounded, or dead?

The book posits hauntings by New Jersey luminaries such as Clarence Clemons and Stephen Crane, but offers no evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, to support the stories.

Sadly, the book also could have used a good editor to smooth out some of the stilted and awkward phrasing, as well as several instances where the wrong word was used entirely. The authors misuse a lot of basic vocabulary, such as "bazaar" instead of "bizarre," "external" for "eternal," and "hanger" for "hangar." The authors' interest in a topic is "peaked" rather than "piqued." They even write "a stone's through" instead of "a stone's throw" ... did anyone read this manuscript before it went to press?

They have the bad habit of using quotation marks where none are necessary. And they are needlessly repetitive; take this passage as an example:

Since this evaluation I have made several visits to Lakehurst and its infamous haunted Hangar No. 1. Extremely haunted is the tarmac area in front of the famous Hangar No. 1 and inside the hangar at the NAS (Naval Air Station) at Lakehurst, New Jersey.

Sad to say, probably the most interesting chapter is at the end, about an investigation that took place at a hotel outside of New Jersey. Even then, it comes with awkward sentences like this: In the brothel earlier that evening another team member's hair on her arm was standing straight up and felt that eerie coldness when in the presence of a spirit with two team members witnessing this experience. Sigh.

The book includes quite a few photographs, although for some reason they are usually not the photos that are described in the text.

This book was a disappointment, and I say that as someone who truly loves folklore, ghost stories and the Jersey shore. Maybe I'd have enjoyed it more if Kimmel and Timper had titled it Hauntings of the New Jersey Shore: Investigations by the New Jersey Ghost Organization. Then, at least, I'd have known what to expect.