Have you ever been awakened at night to see an ethereal figure at the foot of your bed? Have your faucets turned on and of as if guided by an unseen hand? If you enjoy telling or reading such tales, this book of true ghost stories is made for you. North Country media personality Gordie Little has collected and told ghost stories for many years. Now for the first time, he has selected over thirty of his best stories for publication in Ghosts of Clinton County.
Presents a collection of ghostly stories and strange phenomena of Upstate New York including haunted cemeteries, Ruby's castle in Watertown, and many more.
There is a tragic history in New York's North Country of human folly, natural disasters, deadly explosions, terrible train wrecks and other calamities. The famous Barnum & Bailey Circus suffered deeply after its train crashed between Norwood and Potsdam in 1889 and many animals died. Beloved Thousand Island Park was almost entirely destroyed by a devastating fire in 1912, leveling hotels and businesses, and the once-thriving park never fully recovered. The great Massena earthquake measured 5.9 on the Richter scale in 1944 and caused tremendous structural damage, including destroying nearly all chimneys in the area. Author Cheri L. Farnsworth compiles both the man-made and natural disasters that shocked the North Country in the hundred years between 1850 and 1950.
New York's North Country can be hard to define: the region has solid boundaries on three sides but not on the south, where it mingles with the Adirondack Mountains. The spare and isolated landscape experiences long and harsh winters tempered with bucolic scenery. Small-town life and farming--both traditional and innovative--have found a haven and even thrive. The region plays host to determined, community-oriented people who have traded the financial lure of big cities for the satisfaction of barn raisings, outdoor hockey, quiet hikes and old-fashioned diners. In this collection, residents of the region probe their own lives and experiences with the land in a corner of America that is both demanding and rewarding. Discover their exciting, uplifting and poignant tales.
Travel north from the upper Midwest’s metropolises, and before long you’re “Up North”—a region that’s hard to define but unmistakable to any resident or tourist. Crops give way to forests, mines (or their remains) mark the landscape, and lakes multiply, becoming ever clearer until you reach the vastness of the Great Lakes. How to characterize this region, as distinct from the agrarian Midwest, is the question North Country seeks to answer, as a congenial group of scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals explores the distinctive landscape, culture, and history that define the northern margins of the American Midwest. From the glacial past to the present day, these essays range across the histories of the Dakota and Ojibwe people, colonial imperial rivalries and immigration, and conflicts between the economic imperatives of resource extraction and the stewardship of nature. The book also considers literary treatments of the area—and arguably makes its own contributions to that literature, as some of the authors search for the North Country through personal essays, while others highlight individuals who are identified with the area, like Sigurd Olson, John Barlow Martin, and Russell Kirk. From the fur trade to tourism, fisheries to supper clubs, Finnish settlers to Native treaty rights, the nature of the North Country emerges here in all its variety and particularity: as clearly distinct from the greater Midwest as it is part of the American heartland.
"From horse thieves to hurricanes, from shattered Southern myths to fractured family ties, from Nashville to Myrtle Beach to Miami, Low Country is a lyrical, devastating, fiercely original memoir" of one family's changing fortunes in the Low Country of South Carolina (Justin Taylor, author of Riding with the Ghost). J. Nicole Jones is the only daughter of a prominent South Carolina family, a family that grew rich building the hotels and seafood restaurants that draw tourists to Myrtle Beach. But at home, she is surrounded by violence and capriciousness: a grandfather who beats his wife, a barman father who dreams of being a country music star. At one time, Jones's parents can barely afford groceries; at another, her volatile grandfather presents her with a fur coat. After a girlhood of extreme wealth and deep debt, of ghosts and folklore, of cruel men and unwanted spectacle, Jones finds herself face to face with an explosive possibility concerning her long-abused grandmother that she can neither speak nor shake. And through the lens of her own family's catastrophes and triumphs, Jones pays homage to the landscapes and legends of her childhood home, a region haunted by its history: Eliza Pinckney cultivates indigo, Blackbeard ransacks the coast, and the Gray Man paces the beach, warning of Hurricane Hazel.
