Seeing isn’t always believing.

A figure in an old gown is glimpsed at the top of the stairs. But everyone knows there’s no such thing as ghosts. Are there? Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes aren’t so sure.

Janes is the founder of Boroughs of the Dead, a haunted-house tour of New York City; Hieber is one of its guides. “A Haunted History of Invisible Women: True Stories of America’s Ghosts” is their first book together. When there’s a good story, they tell it. When it seems too good to be true, they also report that.

They’re also open to the stories behind these stories and what they say about gender, sex, and society.

“Historically, women have always lived cheek by jowl with death,” Janes writes in her introduction (the authors sometimes alternate chapters, other times they collaborate). “We hover near the border of death for hours, sometimes days, during the delivery of children, and historically, we have very often died in the process.”

Yet not only are women more aware of mortality on Earth, they seem to be — at least in legend and literature — more marked for immortality once they depart it. Female ghosts dominate spooky tales around the world. “The unleashed feminine, that awesome maelstrom of incredible sexual and physical power,” writes Janes, “is dangerous and often leads to a terrible afterlife.”

The two writers collected spectral stories from more than 300 years on subjects from dowagers to slaves, killers to victims. Both authors write about Salem, Mass., the capital of America’s witch hunts and a place rich in ghostly history. Today, the town lures tourists with a playful approach, but the reality was far uglier, the authors say. One supposed witch, Bridget Bishop, scandalized the town by, among other sins, wearing a red blouse. She was hung for witchcraft. Today, her ghost is said to haunt the seafood restaurant that now stands on her land.