To stand on Battle Green in Lexington is to literally stand in the place where this country was born. It was here where a group of the King’s subjects decided that they would rather fight than bow. Though it’s unlikely that on that day in 1775, April 19 to be precise, they believed they were […]
The Fairy and the Fiddle
Faerie Ring in Tullyhorkey, county Donegal, Ireland, and the story of magical fiddles and pipes, photographed by history travel photographer Todd Atteberry for the History Trekker
Salem, Massachusetts: The Historical Record and a Salem Travelogue
Salem is a town riddled with cliche, hoary with history and a fascinating place to spend some time. This piece from the Gothic Cabinet of Curiosity and Mysteries travels to New England in search of the timeless quality, when witches were thought to roam the landscape.
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne
By Nathaniel Hawthorne The great-great-grandson of the only judge in Salem’s witch trials who never publicly regretted his role, Nathaniel Hawthorne spent much of his life dealing with his family’s past through his writing. Whilst The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables get all the notoriety, perhaps none of his works deal as […]
The Pursuit of Ichabod Crane, from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving
Writing in an introduction from a reprinting of the story in 1996, Henry Steiner, Village Historian of Sleepy Hollow states that “At the close of his narrative, Irving anticipates a time when change will have so completely altered Sleepy Hollow that cramped historians will doubt that it once existed at all.” Irving need not have […]
Tales of Old Stony Brook II: Of William Sidney Mount, spirits and Spiritualism
The Hawkins Mount House. In Richard Matheson’s classic novel from the 1970s, Hell House, a team of investigators are sent to spend a week in a haunted house to provide definitive proof of life after death. Almost immediately, a conflict breaks out between the scientist, who while not doubting the existence of the supernatural, or […]
