page_title: Mysterious New Mexico
section_title: Press coverage and reviews
hierarchical_section_title: Mysterious New Mexico / Reception / Press coverage and reviews
caption_attribution_description: English: The miracle staircase in Santa Fe's Loretto Chapel, the subject of many legends and myths. Photo by Benjamin Radford.
context_page_description: Mysterious New Mexico: Miracles, Magic, and Monsters in the Land of Enchantment is a 2014 collection of thirteen investigations conducted by author Ben Radford into cases involving claims of the paranormal occurring in or with significant connections to New Mexico.
context_section_description: Two of the investigations recounted in this book received press coverage before its publication. The Albuquerque Journal covered Radford's investigation of the KiMo Theater in 2009. Both television station KRQE and USA Today reported on Radford's experiments to identify the cause of the images widely known as the Santa Fe Courthouse Ghost in 2007.
  In an article for the "Pasatiempo" section of the Santa Fe New Mexican, Robert Nott interviewed Radford about his investigative methods and the psychology behind belief in supernatural phenomena. Regarding the book, Nott wrote, "Using both forensic techniques and journalistic inquiry, Radford makes a pretty good case that La Posada de Santa Fe is not haunted by the ghost of Julia Staab, that a little spirit boy named Bobby does not haunt Albuquerque’s KiMo Theatre, that the Miraculous Staircase in Loretto Chapel isn’t that miraculous, and that La Llorona is nothing more than a rural legend."
  A reviewer for the Cibola Beacon was impressed with the author's scholarly research, citing the  "17 references in the 21 pages devoted to the worldwide phenomenon known as 'La Llorona,'" a "five-page index," and, "copious references at the end of each chapter."
  Skeptical writer and podcast host Susan Gerbic wrote, "You can almost see how he is thinking this through, how best to investigate it. Where are the actual claims that can be tested, researched? Then once he has done that he leads us through the investigative process." She later added, "the importance of original research—going back to the first source [as Radford does] and not relying on secondhand (and more likely fifthhand) stories—cannot be stressed strongly enough."
  In October 2014, Lesley Anderson of Fast Company wrote an article profiling both the author and his investigative techniques in the case of the Santa Fe Courthouse Ghost.
caption: The miracle staircase in Santa Fe's Loretto Chapel
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