Supernatural the book of monsters, demons, spirits and ghouls

Preface

From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties, good Lord, preserve us.
-OLD IRISH SAYING

And when the good Lord won't, we will.
-NEWISH WINCHESTER SAYING

Sam and Dean Winchester, at your service. We're hunters. Dispatchers of spirits, scourges of the undead and unnatural, feared by demons and shapeshifters and boogeymen of all shapes and sizes. In a nutshell? We track down monsters, and then we blow the suckers away.
We've been in this line of work all our lives. Sam was six months old when a demon killed our mother. Dean was five years old. You might say we've both grown up in the family business. Neither one of us has ever held an honest job, except for Sam briefly while he was off deluding himself that he could lead a normal life. The murder of his girlfriend Jessica-in exactly the way our mother was murdered-put an end to that dream, and he rejoined the firm of Winchester and Sons.
Then, last year, the family business was cut back down to two.
Our dad sacrificed himself to save Dean. Cut a deal with the same demonic bastard that killed our mother and Jessica. Now we're out to get that Yellow-Eyed Son of a Bitch, and we're taking down every evil thing we run across along the way.
We're not the only ones. You might not see them, or recognize their work, but there are other hunters out there. People who have dedicated their lives to keeping you safe from things you didn't know existed and wouldn't want to believe in if you did. Some of them taught our dad the ropes: Daniel Elkins, Bobby Singer-good people. And some of them have helped us along the way, like Jo and Ellen Harvelle.
And some of them have let hunting turn them into the kind of monster they spend their lives trying to snuff. Yeah, Gordon. We're talking to you.
It's a real problem. You look into the abyss, Nietzsche said, and the abyss looks back. Number one of the hunter's list of priorities is wasting evil, but number 1A is making sure that what you're about to waste really is evil. Sometimes it isn't easy. Sometimes all you have to go on is your gut instinct, and sometimes you make decisions that get people killed.
So how do you tell the difference between a haunt and a plain old run of bad luck? That's one of the questions that's plagued hunters from the beginning. Back in medieval Europe, people were a little more likely to jump to supernatural conclusions: now, we find all the time that a series of accidents that might look like a haunting or curse isn't anything of the kind. It's a rough old world out there, even without the demons and black magic and unquiet spirits.
Often enough, though, there are things that can't be explained by science, or even by the various weird extremes of human behavior. We've learned to distinguish the supernatural from the merely bizarre.
Our dad taught us to look for patterns. If there is a string of unexplained deaths in a particular place, has it happened before? Some supernatural bad guys appear for a few years, or a few days, and then disappear for a while. Shtrigas are like that, and rakshasas, and some kinds of demons. Some angry spirits work along the same pattern. They take out their frustrations for a while and then lie low, which makes it harder sometimes to figure out what's got them so riled up. Hard to waste a spirit when you don't know what's motivating it. Know thine enemy, it says somewhere; our dad drilled that into us, too.
Some patterns are easy to figure. Killings on the full moon? Fits the MO of a werewolf-although it's not always that simple. Series of drownings, year after year, near the summer solstice? We'll put our money on a nix. Mass disappearances near a certain location? Angry spirit, details TK. Strange weather patterns and localized crop failures? That one's probably a demon-more later on that. Much more.
Other patterns might include a relationship among all of the people affected. Do they hang out at the same bar? Did they all play baseball on the same little League team? Have they all owned, at one time or another, a particular item that might be carrying a curse? This part of the job is just like police work. The difference is that cops put criminals in jail. We put spirits back in the afterlife, and demons back in hell.
In this book, we're going to take you through the various spirits and monsters and demons that we've run into while searching for the big one: the Yellow-Eyed Demon that destroyed our family.
There's a war coming, and when it starts, we're all going to need to know as much as we can about the other side.
So read on, and see what it's like when you take a step into the world of the supernatural.