Exclusive | Ghost hunters spooky cookbooks feature recipes from real-life haunted places

Bone appetite!Paranormal investigator Amy Bruni has a penchant for writing cookbooks with recipes from famous haunted locations — and during many of her visits, she speaks to the ghosts that reside there.After her first book, “Food to Die For: Over 50 Recipes and Stories from America’s Most Legendary Haunted Places,” was published, one reader reported a chilling experience while preparing a dish from its pages.An employee at the Rhode Island farmhouse that inspired the horror movie “The Conjuring” whipped up the Sunday pot roast recipe given to Bruni by the Perron family who owned the haunted house — in the actual residence itself — unknowingly summoning the ghosts lurking inside.

“They were all alone in the house, they started cooking it and recording it … They started hearing footsteps upstairs, a door close, they thought they heard voices,” said Bruni, whose paranormal TV series, “It Followed Me Home,” premieres Halloween on BeaconTV.“And if you think about it, it makes sense, because that was their Sunday roast, they made it every Sunday.So if there were spirits there that recognized this, I feel like they would be like, ‘Oh, this rings a bell.’ No one thinks to use food as an investigative tool, but we may be onto something.”Bruni, a ghost hunter for 30 years, recently released her second cookbook, “Cuisine to Kill For: Over 50 Recipes and True Crime Stories from the World’s Most Haunted Places,” which takes readers inside asylums, restaurants and residences — from the Paris Catacombs to Bran Castle in Transylvania to Five Fishermen Restaurant in Halifax, Canada, once the site of the funeral home that housed victims of the Titanic disaster.The idea for the cookbooks came about after she saw a meatloaf recipe card written by Lizzie Borden, the 32-year-old Massachusetts woman who was tried and acquitted of the double ax murders of her father and stepmother in 1893.“I thought, ‘Would people make that?'” she recall...