The more you delve into the stories behind history's greatest names, the more you realize they have something in common: a mystifying lack of common sense. Thomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb, believed that he could communicate with the dead and built the world's very first hotline to heaven: the Spirit Phone. Marie and Pierre Curie, famous for discovering radioactivity, slept next to a lump of radioactive material for years and strapped it to their arms to watch it burn them in real time. Lord Byron, the acclaimed British poet, literally took a bear with him to university. Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravity and motion, but he also looked up at the sun without eye protection. The result? Three days of blindness. Nikola Tesla, whose scientific work led to the invention of the AC unit, fell in love with a pigeon. Edison's Ghosts is filled with examples of the so-called best of humanity doing, to put it bluntly, some really dumb shit. You'll discover stories that deserve to be told but rarely are: the hilarious, regrettable, and downright baffling lesser-known achievements that never made it into our history books-until now.