The Ballad of Tom Dooley: A Whydunnit

In 1958, the Kingston Trio made a recording of a ballad fragment based on a sensational 1866 murder that occurred in the mountains of western North Carolina. They are said to have learned it from a man named Frank Proffitt. The details given in their version are frustratingly vague: only the name of the putative [...]

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The Valentine Bride

Of all the stories of ghostly lovers I’ve ever run across, this is my favorite. My friend Sharon (aka Aunt Ornery) told it to me from her family’s recollections some years ago. I’ve posted it before, but I beg your indulgence in repeating it. Along Conasauga Creek, in the shadow of the Unicoi Mountains, stand [...]

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The Lovers of Porthgwarra

Love, said the Singer who wrote that lovely anomalous book the Song of Songs, is as strong as death. The Lovers of Porthgwarra were another Romeo and Juliet couple, but they proved that love is indeed as strong as death– perhaps even stronger. In the early nineteenth century, there lived, in the wee Cornish coastal [...]

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Willie and Nellie

Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts, was unhappily married and awaiting a divorce decree when her estranged husband died in 1905. It must have galled her somewhat to compare her marriage with that of her parents, William Washington Gordon II and Eleanor Kinzie Gordon–a half-century love affair that began with a crushed [...]

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The Bridal Chamber of Silver Springs

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life. . .William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Prologue There’s an artesian spring, in the midst of Florida’s attraction at Silver Springs in Ocala, that’s known as the Bridal Chamber. As I recreate the story (basing my account on the [...]

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The Witchin’ Claith o’ Green

. . .licht, licht’s the luve that can be coft wi’ gowd an’ buskins gay. . .”The Green Ladye o’ Newton” old Scots ballad As the wisdom of our grandmothers through a long descent has it, the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Or, perhaps, in other ways modesty prevents me from [...]

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The Bride of Annandale

. . .the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. . .(William Butler Yeats, “The Stolen Child”, 1886) From what I’ve read and observed, it’s far more common for a mourner, rather than a person actually buried there, to haunt a graveyard. One of my favorite stories about a ghostly mourner comes from [...]

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Siren Song

Ireland’s Belvelly Castle is a haunted place, home to at least two ghosts. One such is the once-lovely Margaret Hodnett, eternally seeking her lost beauty in long-smashed mirrors. The other ghost at Belvelly was there long before Margaret; long indeed before the present ruinous castle was built. In life he sang like no mortal thirteenth-century [...]

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The Love of Jubal Reeves

Confession time: I learned to hate Valentine’s Day a long time ago. Never mind why; just know that it’s so. It does present unprecedented opportunities, though, for stories about a crazy little thang called love. This one, which I first read in Fred T. Morgan’s Ghost Tales of the Uwharries (1968) is one of the [...]

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