Southern Illinois is a strange place. Those of us descended from the early settlers come from an anti-social stock. They were those who pushed into the Appalachians from the early colonies, only to find those remote regions too crowded. The pushed on through the passes and gaps, settled for a few years then noticed there […]
Stranger Things in the nighttime sky … In the sixties, a little boy sees a rocket in the sky over Carmi, Illinois that shouldn’t be there
It was the sixties in small town Illinois, I was a little boy, and was walking to my Granny Bert’s house. She lived a block away, I wasn’t quite halfway there, in front of the Duvall’s house. I used to walk barefoot, till one day I stepped on a dead squirrel’s skull. I still walked […]
A strange account of the monster rattlesnake Big Jim, who from his lair on Rattlesnake Bluff terrorized the Skillet Fork and Wabash river valleys … (or Snakes on a Plain)
Rattlesnake bluff, home of the legendary rattlesnake Big Jim is a heavily wooded bluff overlooking the Skillet Fork River, in White County, Illinois. I’d figured that much out by poring over Google Earth for some time, trying to match up the satellite images with the historical record. Or what little record I had, and I […]
Lakey’s Ghost: On folklore and folk horror from the prairie, and how the legend of the headless horseman galloped westward across an ocean and a continent
On Lakey’s Ghost from John W. Allen; Legends & Lore of Southern Illinois … Until recent years it was a common custom to go calling on neighbors in the evening and “set until bedtime.” There were no telephones, television sets, or radios for entertainment. There were no automobiles nor were there any roads for them to travel. […]
Eating Poe, Part II: Edgar Allan Poe’s time on Sullivan’s Island and debunking a Charleston myth
I wake up before dawn and heard the ocean outside. The dunes separate the beach house from the sea itself, but not the smell of the ocean, nor the pounding of the surf, a dull thud, without the crackle and sizzle of the foam. The sky is beginning to lighten, I get dressed and grab […]
A return to Bardstown, Kentucky: Spending the night in a cell at the Jailer’s Inn, a haunted jail in a town known around the world for its ghosts
The only troubling sound I heard the night I spent in the Jailer’s Inn in Bardstown, Kentucky was the sound of a cell door closing. There are two reasons I found that disturbing. First, the jail was shut down late in the twentieth century, so there are no inmates, and it’s unlikely the staff was […]
