This text is a collection of poems and tales concentrated on superstitions and supernatural tales transmitted by the white settlers of New England. While the accounts vary, most deal with the appearance of ghosts or specters as omens of death, fulfillments of the wishes of deceased persons, or clues to the identities of wrong-doers. Originally published in 1847.
A collection of folktales highlighting famous and not-so-famous New England ghosts, mysterious happenings, powers of darkness, and wonders of the invisible world. Pull up a chair or gather round the campfire and get ready for 35 creepy tails of ghostly hauntings, eerie happenings, and other strange occurrences in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Set in New England's historic towns, charming old islands, and sparsely populated backwoods, the stories in this entertaining and compelling collection will have you looking over your shoulder again and again. Yankee folklore is kept alive in these expert retellings by master storyteller S.E. Schlosser, and in artist Paul Hoffman's evocative illustrations. You'll meet seaweed-covered phantom sailors and a ghostly black dog, hear otherworldly voices and things that go bump in the night, and feel an icy wind on the back of your neck on a warm summer evening. Whether read around the campfire on a dark and stormy night or from the backseat of the family van on the way to grandma’s, this is a collection to treasure.
Suitably, hauntings and paranormal happenings in the Lone Star state are larger than life. Included in this must-read collection are tales of the ghost lights of Marfa, the werewolf of Elroy, and the Devil’s brand in the eternal roundup of El Paso. Your hair will stand on end as you read about the mysteries and lore in Spooky Texas.
This comprehensive comparative approach to the folklore, fantasy, and horror literature of New England stretches from the earliest European exploration to Stephen King, John Updike, and Shirley Jackson. Includes interviews with Les Daniels, Grandt, and other horror writers who reside or set their stories in New England.
New Englanders are always cursing. But a colorful profanity uttered by some stero-typically taciturn old Yankee is usually more humorous than menacing. Yet, true maledictions (the opposite of benedictions) have frequently been spoken on New England soil, curses intended to invoke evil, injury, or total destruction against other people. Stories about preternatural revenge are numerous in Yankee lore, with each New England state providing its favorites. You’ll read about curses that were followed by the strange disappearance of a father and daughter in Rhode Island, mysterious afflictions in Massachusetts, a river of death in Maine, an unaccountable blight in New Hampshire, unexplained madness in Connecticut, and other eerie happenings from New England’s colorful history. Some are well known, at least regionally. Others are nearly forgotten. Within these pages, storyteller Joseph A. Citro vividly brings these tales to life, letting us decide if these tales of woe were bad luck or . . . something else.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexicans and Americans joined together to transform the U.S.-Mexico borderlands into a crossroads of modern economic development. This book reveals the forgotten story of their ambitious dreams and their ultimate failure to control this fugitive terrain. Focusing on a mining region that spilled across the Arizona-Sonora border, this book shows how entrepreneurs, corporations, and statesmen tried to domesticate nature and society within a transnational context. Efforts to tame a 'wild' frontier were stymied by labour struggles, social conflict, and revolution. Fugitive Landscapes explores the making and unmaking of the U.S.-Mexico border, telling how ordinary people resisted the domination of empires, nations, and corporations to shape transnational history on their own terms. By moving beyond traditional national narratives, it offers new lessons for our own border-crossing age.
New England's history is marked with witch executions, curses and an untold number of cemeteries hiding mysteries beneath their stones. In this sometimes harsh landscape, the truth is often stranger than fiction. Examine the footprints burned into the ledge of Devil's Foot Rock in Rhode Island. Spend a night at the Kennebunk Inn in Maine, where the mischievous specter of Silas Perkins still resides. Traverse an old dirt road near Sterling, Connecticut, where the Darn Man's frozen body was uncovered in 1863. Authors Thomas D'Agostino and Arlene Nicholson uncover the history behind the region's best-kept secrets and lore. As you flip through these pages of New England's legends, tread lightly--you just might find a story that will follow you home.
Bringing together recent scholarship on religion and the spatial imagination, Kristen Poole examines how changing religious beliefs and transforming conceptions of space were mutually informative in the decades around 1600. Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare's England explores a series of cultural spaces that focused attention on interactions between the human and the demonic or divine: the deathbed, purgatory, demonic contracts and their spatial surround, Reformation cosmologies and a landscape newly subject to cartographic surveying. It examines the seemingly incongruous coexistence of traditional religious beliefs and new mathematical, geometrical ways of perceiving the environment. Arguing that the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century stage dramatized the phenomenological tension that resulted from this uneasy confluence, this groundbreaking study considers the complex nature of supernatural environments in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest.
A Companion to American Gothic features a collection of original essays that explore America’s gothic literary tradition. The largest collection of essays in the field of American Gothic Contributions from a wide variety of scholars from around the world The most complete coverage of theory, major authors, popular culture and non-print media available
The Gothic Literature and History of New England surveys the history, nature and future of the Gothic mode in the region, from the witch trials through the Black Lives Matter Movement. Texts include Cotton Mather and other Puritan divines who collected folklore of the supernatural; the Frontier Gothic of Indian captivity narratives; the canonical authors of the American Renaissance such as Melville and Hawthorne; the women's ghost story tradition and the Domestic Gothic from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Shirley Jackson; H. P. Lovecraft; Stephen King; and writers of the current generation who respond to racial and gender issues. The work brings to the surface the religious intolerance, racism and misogyny inherent in the New England Gothic, and how these nightmares continue to haunt literature and popular culture—films, television and more.
