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 […]
Tales From Head of the Harbor & St. James Part IV: A True Ghost Story from Head of the Harbor
Top: The Carman-White House. Samuel Carman was a wealthy landowner in Head of the Harbor, New York in the 19th century. Following the death of his wife in 1888, his unmarried daughters built on Moriches road, a two story house in the Victorian style, in the same neighborhood as the other Carmans of the area. […]
Poe in Charleston and the Legend of Annabel Lee
Sullivan’s Island, Charleston, South Carolina. “I asked myself- “Of all melancholy topics what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death, was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length the answer here also is […]
The Ragged Cot Inn: Where spirits go bump in the dark of an English country night
In December 1760, the landlord of the Ragged Cot, Bill Clavers, decided to rob the midnight stagecoach travelling to London. Before setting out, he gave himself Dutch courage and resistance to the cold with liberal helpings of rum. As he staggered from his bedroom with loaded pistols, his wife, with their young child in her […]
