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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 recalled.
After “Food to Die For” hit shelves in 2024, she got her answer.
“I hear from many people that it actually is good,” she said.
Readers begged Bruni for darker stories, and for her second book, she focuses on places that had a true crime story take place within their walls — and also expands to spots outside the US.
One recipe, for penne vodka, comes from the Valley Inn Restaurant in Portsmouth, R.I., whose estate was the site of one of the most infamous murders in American history. In 1673, Rebecca Cornell was found burned to death on the floor of her bedroom, half inside the fireplace.
Her son, Thomas, was convicted of the murder, only because Rebecca’s brother, John, saw his sister come to him in a dream and tell him, “See how I was burnt with fire?”
“That’s the only time in American history where someone was executed based on the testimony of a ghost,” Bruni explained.
Bruni has investigated the restaurant multiple times and says she has communicated with Thomas’ ghost.
“Thomas is buried in the parking lot outside of the restaurant, and there’s no grave marker for him. And so the rest of his family is buried at another spot, and we asked if he wanted to go back with the rest of his family, and he said ‘No,'” Bruni recalled.
There is one Manhattan recipe in “Cuisine to Kill For” — the carrot cake from Fraunces Tavern in the Financial District, home to the 1798 death of ballerina Anna Gardie, who was stabbed by her husband with a carving knife as she lay in bed in a murder-suicide.
“To this day, people still claim to see her apparition,” Bruni said.
Another recipe is for Shrimp Wiggle — used to feed patients at Pennhurst Asylum in Spring City, Pa., known for its mistreatment of residents.
Bruni also investigated the asylum, and after hearing scratching inside an attic closet, she decided to look into it.
“I’m convinced that there is some sort of rabid animal in this closet. And so, we open it and jump back and this closet is completely empty,” she recalled.
Bruni said her interest in the paranormal began in the Alameda, Calif., haunted house she grew up in — once inhabited by a young man who died in World War II.
“My first clear memory of seeing a ghost, I was 8 years old, and I saw an apparition of a man … standing outside the second-story window of our house … wearing all green. I ran to get my mom, and she looked at me just very matter-of-factly, and said, ‘Oh yeah, he’s a ghost. I call him Mr. Green Jeans.'”