GhostFolk

GONE FOR WEEK - SEE ME IN OKLAHOMA

2009-11-02T05:43:00.000-08:00

I'll be talking ghosts Friday and Saturday at the Red Dirt Literary Festival in the Sooner State, where I was born and went to high school. Lots of ghosts for me.

I'll also find time to visit my favorite graveyard. It's a small hidden meadow on tribal land near Quapaw. The exsiting graves are simple coffin hollows (depressions in the ground) now, but they are special in other ways.

"Breathing" pipes extend from underground into the air at each gave site.

While I usually write ghosts, I am also busy collecting WITCH LORE from various parts of the South. I hope to hear something about the elusive Cherokee witches while visiting with Western-band members of The People. Maybe a Choctaw witch or two, as well.

Because of a rockslide blocking I-40 just west of Asheville, I'll be taking a two-hour detour to fabulous Johnson City, Tennessee, on my way out of town. And, because I don't fly unless I have to, I'll be driving two days each to get there and back. So I am gone for a week, more or less.

Until I am home again, I'll leave you (in my next post) with a musical ghost encounter I heard in Burlington, North Carolina.

My Vote: BEST HALLOWEEN COSTUME 2009

2009-10-31T08:22:00.000-07:00

A vampire chihuahua at right! (I think he’s named Edward.)

Cricket Messenger Ghost for Halloween

2009-10-30T06:44:00.001-07:00

Just in time for Halloween, I heard a wonderful ghost experience from an audience member at the May Memorial Library in Burlington, North Carolina, last week.

It was the true story of a Ghost Cricket. No kidding.

I was talking about the ways people experience ghosts, you know, by seeing one, hearing one, feeling an icy presence on the stairs... There are even ghosts you can smell.

I also had spoken about the number of times people have told me they dreamed a ghost of a recently-passed loved one who, in the dream, tells them where something (often money) is hidden.

When they get up the next day, they look in this dream-revealed location and that something (again, often money) is found. Apparently, it troubles people to no end when they die and forget to tell a loved one where to find the rainy-day cash that was hidden away.

Because I have heard explicit examples of this type of ghost visit, I advise people when they do see a ghost to be sure to ask it where the money is.

And up popped a hand from the seats in Burlington followed by the woman's story of a cricket ghost that appeared in her life.

A cricket shows up (well, the sound of a cricket) following the death of a woman's father. She has been staying in her father's house through the last days of his final illness.

The woman follows the cricket chirps all through the house for a period of three days. There's just one circket chriping, but it leads her over the span of time throughout the house.

Finally, she isolates the circket in her father's bedroom. Having drawn her there, the circket is no longer heard in other rooms of the house.

On the second day, the cricket only starts chirping when she enters his room. She leaves the bedroom and goes back. Each time she opens the door, the cricket starts chriping.

No matter where she stands in the room, though, she can't quite tell where the chirps are coming from. Until the third day.

One the third day, the cricket is clearly chriping away inside the dresser. Once she approaches the dresser, it shuts up. She opens and closes each dresser drawer in sequence. When she opens the fourth drawer, the circket chirps.

She takes all the socks and underwear out of the drawer. No cricket. But when she closes the empty drawer, the cricket starts up again. So she removes the drawer from the dresser and sets it on the bed next to the items of clothing.

The empty drawer starts chirping. Frustrated and thinking she might be going nuts, the lady finally turns the drawer upside down. And, you guessed it, there's the cricket. She reaches for it and it jumps away.

"I saw it, then it just left," she told me. "It just wasn't there any longer."

But something else was.

A cardstock business-size envelope had been taped to the bottom of the drawer. Inside, the woman finds a certain number [I won't say the amount here for privacy's sake] of hundred-dollar bills.

Over the course of several weeks, no other money was found while clearing out her father's estate. Oh, and the cricket that "wasn't there any longer" was never heard chriping inside the house again.

TRUE GHOSTS in Burlington, North Carolina

2009-10-19T05:31:00.001-07:00

I will be sharing true ghost experiences this weekend:

2 p.m Sat., Oct. 24
May Memorial Library
Burlington, N.C.

Ghost Cats of the South & Ghost Dogs of the South will be available. But I'm much more interested in hearing ghost experiences than I am in selling a books.

What's NOT a Ghost - And What Is

2009-10-12T09:55:00.001-07:00

First of all, the kid in the sheet is not a ghost.

Still, it's a cute photo. And the outfit being worn is likely most tantalizing to bears in the vicinity. They love it when you can't see them coming.

Things that are told to me as ghost encounters that I get VERY unexcited about are cached photos of orbs.

1. At least 99.99% of the photos of orbs taken by digital cameras are NOT ghosts. That's just an opinion, mind you. But, I really, truly never want to see another orb photo.

Until one talks to me, I remain unconvinced that digital-camera produced orbs have anything to do with ghosts.

Maybe when someone gets a photo of an orb wearing a hat or eating a piece of pizza, you can sign me up as faithful follower of the Orbitists. Until then....

2. Okay, I think it is really nifty when people find things they lost. The fact that I looked for something right there and didn't see it, then looked right there again and find it, does NOT mean a ghost was hiding it from me.

Because people do have near-death experiences, I will accept that near-ghost experiences occur. Perhaps they occur with some frequency. Sometimes when you are alone you have the eerie feeling someone is watching you. Except when someone is (now that's scary), you might be experiencing a ghost.

When you wake up in the morning in a house all by yourself and you hear someone whispering your name over and over again this could very truly be a ghost experience. I know a young woman who moved out of her ground-floor college apartment after two weeks of experiencing this ghostly whispering of her name. An old house near UNC-Asheville had been divided into two apartments downstairs.

She said she felt as if she were being softly touched... that it was this touching that woke her and then she heard the voice. She had never experienced anything similar before moving in or after leaving the apartment. She told me that even driving on the street where the old house is located still fills her with a sense of ominous dread.

Do you believe this is a true ghost experience? I do.

When it comes to ghosts, seeing is sometimes believing. But, believe me, you don't have to see a ghost to encounter a ghost. The ghost only has to see you.

13 TYPES OF GHOSTS

2009-10-05T04:48:00.000-07:00

This is pretty basic stuff. Ghosts tend to be defined by

A.) what they are up to now

and by B.) how they died.

I would add by C.) how they are experienced or encountered by the living.

I have very detailed stories (collected from the people who experienced them) of each.

Let’s go with A.) for now. Ghost Types by What They Are Up To.

1. Stuck Ghosts. Going about their normal routine as if alive. These ghosts seem to get stuck in the real world somehow.

Some are stuck in their favorite earth places. I hear story after story of kitchen ghosts. They just like being there. I also hear of ghosts attached to a particular piece of furniture (watch out for rocking chairs, Lay-Z Boy recliners, and beds!) and small objects, including jewelry.

2. Dying-Again Ghosts. Over and over and over again. Popular, as an idea anyway, on ghost tours.

3. Searching Ghosts. They're looking for something and aren't going away until they find it.

4. Comfort Ghosts. Relatives and loved ones who drop by to let you know that everything is okay and it is time for you to quit grieving.

5. Protecting-You or Warning-You Ghosts. A ghost who appears to keep a wandering child safe from the cliff's edge is an example.

6. Mean Ghosts. They just want attention and don't care how they get it.

7. Sad Ghosts. These ghosts are stuck in re-living their most sorrowful moments in life. You hear them weeping. Oh, and weeping... and weeping some more.

8. Message Ghosts. They have a message for you, specifically for you. Often a relative. They tell you where money is hidden, for example.

9. Messenger Ghosts. They have a message for you. But the message is from someone else, usually dead. Really rare, these courier ghosts are absolutely scream-scary when the messenger is a stranger ghost.

10. Explaining Ghost. This ghost wants someone, anyone, to know what really happened.

Even from this general list, you can see that there are two very basic types of ghosts that people experience:

1. Ghosts who are stuck where they are.

2. Ghosts who go away.

As I hear people tell me of their own ghost encounters, my first division as to type is between ghosts of people you know and ghosts of strangers.

11. Ghost Animals. They fit almost all of the above and include beloved family-member dogs and cats, but also horses and, yes, even cows. I have heard of two first-person encounters with bovine boo-critters.

12. Animal Ghosts. These are people ghosts using the form of an animal to visit you. Common as a comfort ghost, as well. You run across a talking dog, it may not be the dog who is doing the talking.

13. Finally, experiences of God, angels, faeries, cognition of living people in dire straights far away, etc. seem to share some phenomena with ghost experiences. They are different and I don't include them in my own catalog of first-person ghost encounters.

Some people like to say spirits are not tied to earth, ghosts are. I personally think there's a little more overlap than that. I accept that ghosts might make a visit in your dreams (what others would call spirit encounters).

BASIC TYPES OF GHOSTS

2009-10-02T16:24:00.000-07:00

In any number of ways ghosts can be divided into basic types.

There are two basic ways of experiencing a ghost:

1. Ghosts you see.

2. Ghosts who see you.

In ways an individual might become a ghost, there are basically two types again:

1. Ghosts who are ghosts on purpose.

2. Ghosts who are ghosts by accident.

Another old book of True Ghost Stories!

2009-10-01T16:26:00.001-07:00

From Wikipedia: John Kendrick Bangs (1862-1922), an American author and satirist, and the creator of modern Bangsian fantasy, the school of fantasy writing that sets the plot wholly or partially in the afterlife.

I found this little hardcover in a used-books shop and was taken by the color illustration on the black cover, as much as by the title. I knew nothing about this author (who was for some years the editor of Puck).

A bit of synchronicity here, because my new novel (which recently sold to a New York publisher and will be released in 2011) follows in the Bangsian tradition. That makes me a Bangsian.

I had no idea. I just thought I was writing in a fictional arena where I have done lots of research. Ghosts.

Oh, and that other arena. High school is as good a place as any to play dead for a few years.

Before I get too excited about finding Bangs's book as a named historical literary affirmation of my own work, I should point out that he also authored a book called The Idiot.

I might be working in that tradition, as well. Gulp.

DO GHOSTS FLOAT?

2009-09-26T09:31:00.000-07:00

Unhappy or improper burials are known to create ghosts, some of whom are very active and some who just seem to wait around their burial place hoping for help.

Cranky ghosts often result from a person being buried in a crummy manner.

And Sometimes from a proper grave being disturbed.

And sometimes from never being buried at all.

I wonder whether people who drown, and are unlucky enough to never have their remains recovered, become underwater ghosts. This may account for the occasional sighting of a mermaid on a moonlit night.

A resultant ghost from an improper burial is one of the most common of all types of hauntings. Seems like every time a person gets sealed inside a wall, you end up with a ghost in the house.

Not all improper burials are accidental or the result of someone hoping to hide a death from the world. There are reasons aside from accident and secrecy for some improper burials. It is a known historical practice to bury the body of someone believed to be evil in a purposefully improper manner.

Those poor folks thought to be witches or believed to be in league with the devil were purposefully buried face-down. This was to keep their remains from digging their way to the surface should their bodies experience post mortem animation. Should they try to claw their way out of the grave, they end up going in the wrong direction.

When a death sentence was not sufficient punishment for a convicted criminal, some communities would see to it that the remains of the executed were interred at a busy crossroads. In this manner, the ghost of the dead might not experience rest in the afterlife.

There was such a case discovered in a community north of Chattanooga and documented by the Tennessee Folklore Society. The remains of the body of a woman was uncovered at a dirt crossroads as the road was being dug for widening and paved surfacing by the WPA in the late 1930s. The skeleton was complete with a wooden stake through the rib bones and the body had been interred face-down.

I wrote about this strange case in The Granny Curse. From time to time on a rainy day here in the mountains, a day like today, I wonder what other secrets rural crossroads might be holding beneath the surface.

As the Asheville area flooded earlier this week, I couldn’t help but also wonder whether ghosts float. If they do, they could end up about anywhere. They could end up tangled in the branches of a tree. If they don't, I wouldn't want to go swimming just anywhere.

Always Close the Gate

2009-09-14T06:32:00.000-07:00

Ghosts, it seems, cannot navigate through a chain-link fence.

Don't Leave the Dead Outdoors

2009-09-10T04:58:00.001-07:00

One way to create a ghost. Leaving dead people lying about outside often results in their getting up and walking away.

GHOSTS IN THE MAIL - With Applause!

2009-08-19T14:43:00.000-07:00

I am fascinated by Mary's account of ghost applause in Virginia. She was kind enough to send this along to me and allow me to post her original telling of the encounter. Thanks, Mary!

>>Randy,

When I met you at "City Lights" bookstore in Sylva, I promised to tell about my experiences when staying in a plantation house in Clarke County, Virginia. In brief,this is what occurred.

I spent 3 nights and parts of 4 days in one of the many plantation houses to be found in Clarke County. The first 2 nights, I awoke to a sensation of extreme cold (the infamous "cold spot".)

The 3rd night I was awakened by what sounded like applause, not in my room, but in the front of the house where the drawing room and dining room/ball room are located.

One afternoon, while standing in the entry hall, I heard what sounded like people talking. I knew I was alone in the house, but nevertheless I turned around. Of course there was nothing to be seen, but the sounds were real.

Perhaps the applause and the voices were connected in some way - a house party of some sort?! None of these caused me any alarm, but there was one further event that did.

I had been visiting friends, and returned after dark. I made my way towards my room, turning off lights as I went. I was in the entry hall, and looked up into the darkness of the stairwell above. It seemed as though there was something decidedly unpleasant/malevolent up there.

There was no way on earth I would have gone up those stairs, and fortunately I didn't have to!

If you have any further questions I would be happy to try to answer them for you. I thoroughly enjoyed your presentation, and your book "Ghost Cats of the South."
Sincerely, Mary T.>>

Dog Dance!

2009-08-08T09:50:00.001-07:00

This wonderful pooch is Walker. But, you know, Walker would rather dance.

Alive and HAPPY... and Just a Little Wet

2009-08-07T02:29:00.000-07:00

Recently I spent five minutes on the phone trying to breathe while simultaneously peeing my pants. My agent called to tell me a publisher has made an offer for my novel of mostly dead people.

The contract is being negotiated by people who know how to do that. I don't want to jinx anything, so I'm waiting a bit to say anything more.

Needless to say, I am as excited as all get out. :-)

This is the most positive turn of events imaginable for anyone who sits alone day after day and week after week and, yes, month after month, writing a book-length work of fiction on the mere hope that someone some day might read it.

Still Alive - But No One Else Is

2009-08-07T02:01:00.000-07:00

My dogs think I am blind. This is because I get up early to write. Very early. The house is dark. I don't live alone. I step on the dogs.

In the dark, I knock over lamps. A bit of irony here, I think. Then I tumble across the floor in my underwear with an upholstered recliner in my arms. And somehow I manage to turn on the coffee.

I keep thinking, if I close one eye and leave the other one open, that I can see in the dark. I can't.

It might be 2:30 in the morning. It might be 3. Once I get the coffee on, I have had a successful day.

I took off a few months from most other activity to write a novel. Sadly, "most other activity" included doing this blog. The book is done now. And it is off to see the world (please, do not open books in the dark -- they don't like it when you do).

All the characters who matter in this novel are dead. What can I say? I do ghosts.

Speaking of having a successful day, the manuscript (is it really a manuscript when it circulates as a digital file?) of mostly dead people recently found a quick and lasting friendship with a wonderful agent, who has my ghosts now. I am very happy about that.

GHOSTS in OKLAHOMA

2009-07-16T05:56:00.000-07:00

I am so pleased to have been asked to present at the 2009 Red Dirt Book Festival in Shawnee, Oklahoma, in November. I just received a few of the posters and aren't they gorgeous?

If you are in the area, be sure to drop by the festival. Send me an e-mail if you have a ghost experience to share and I'm sure we can find a few minutes to talk.

Ghost Cats of the South, Ghost Dogs of the South update. I now have two ghost cow encounters added to the canon of first-person ghost experiences I have collected. One in Tennessee and one in South Carolina.

Not just "Boo Ghosts" now, we also need be leery of things that go Moo in the middle of the night.

2009-06-24T05:51:00.000-07:00

My posts have been few because I have been very busy getting up early to write a new book. I finished it and that's fun to do.

Someone who emails me regularly asked my why I write. She thought a writer must have something to say or something to share with the world. That isn't me. I write to learn.

Until you do it, it is hard to understand just how much a writer learns about life and people and plants and the sky and... love... and... by writing it. Sometimes I think a book writes me. Truly.

It seems like the book was already there and it is telling me stuff, new stuff -- new people, new places, new dreams, new everything. The book tells me what it is and I just write it down and try to spell it right. Sometimes I do.

And this new book was so much fun to learn that I couldn't stay away from it. The characters kept whispering they had more to do and more to say and more to teach me. I even killed some of the characters and they still had things to do and say. In fact, almost every character in this book was dead when the book started.

I learned so much writing this novel that I am currently calling it Dead School.

The one thing I didn't learn was what to do next. Maybe I'll go back to school soon and see if another book is waiting to tell itself to me.

Until then, I'm going to hike around the yard with my dogs and see where the best shade is. You come too?

GHOSTS & THE GRAVELY ILL

2009-05-09T04:12:00.000-07:00

When people are on their death beds they tend to experience ghosts. Most of these experiences are dismissed by others as delusions.

Maybe. Maybe not.

One of the most touching aspects of the nature of dogs and cats is their readiness to provide comfort to, and keep company with, the ill.

And the dying....

And, let's admit it, the recently deceased. Cats and dogs interact with the dead for months and even years after the bodies have been interred. Examples abound.

This is true among their own species and, clearly, among those of other species a dog or a cat may have adopted as family. You, for instance.

It is common for me to hear of a family pet, either dog or cat, continuing to interact with a family member who has passed away. In households who have more than one pet, this is also true when one of their four-legged life companions experience death. I could list dozens of examples I have heard from people who were party to such ghost sensitivity from their family's animals.

I have used examples I have heard as detail and background for stories in both Ghost Dogs of the South and Ghost Cats of the South.

There is another death-bed sort of a ghost I have heard from people who have experienced it. It is a ghost I call The Unknown Comforter. I'll provide a recent true life example in my next blog post.

Hunting the American Witch of Folklore

2009-05-03T04:49:00.001-07:00

As I continue to skulk about collecting antique images of witches and witchcraft of American folklore, I came upon this stunning circa-1910 reproduced painting of the Witches of Harz Mountain (Germany). I have added this antique postcard to the collection as a comparison to American folklore witches.

Hell hounds, pitchforks, bat wings, flying pigs! These are so much more frightening images of witches than found at the same time in American produced images of our supposedly scary Halloween witches.

Many of the German traditions were transplanted in American folklore. The close association of witches with Satan, happily, has not made the transition to the American psyche. Even with our history of having put people to death as witches in Salem Massachusetts, Americans tend to keep our evil witches and Satan apart.

In American folklore, individuals tend to tangle with Satan on his lonesome own. In the South, we out-fiddle him, for one thing.

Still, it is striking to compare our "scary witch" traditonal image to that of Germany's. Copied below, and printed for popular consumption at about the same time as the above Harz Mountain witches, is the American image of a witch in flight on her broom (here depicted as being a Salem Massachusetts witch).

Maybe in America, we prefer happier witches. Even though we killed a bunch of people once for being bewitched.

GHOST CATS IN DURHAM - The Band!

2009-04-28T14:31:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Zachary Corsa for the honor of having a terrific hot band in Durham North Carolina named after the book!

Ghost Cats of the South is now a band. And Zachary was generous enough to mention the book of the same name on the band's website. Check out the link under websites over in the right column.

Here's how Zach describes the group: "We play a folky alternative country/indie style of music, six of us (guitar, bass, keys, drums, cello, violin), and have begun to gig locally as well as other areas in the state. The name is of course an homage to a book I greatly enjoyed."

Cello! Is this too much fun or what?

P.S. I borrowed the art above form the band's website. You should drop by over there and give their samples an ear. These cats are cookin!

GHOST CATS AWARD FINALIST

2009-02-27T01:22:00.000-08:00

From Barbara Gatewood, Chairperson, 2009 Darrell Awards Jury:

I am pleased to announce that "Eat-Your-Face Cat" as it appears in Ghost Cats of the South, by Randy Russell, is one of four finalists for a 2009 Darrell Award for best short fiction.

The awards will be presented at 27th Annual MidSouthCon on March 21, 2009.

The Con this year is at Whispering Woods Hotel and Conference Center, Olive Branch, Mississippi.

The Darrell Awards are given in memory of Dr. Darrell C. Richardson. His books include Max Brand: The Man and His Work, and three volumes of The Edgar Rice Burroughs Library of Illustration.

FRIDAY THE 13TH - ACCENT ON BOOKS - ASHEVILLE

2009-02-10T08:18:00.000-08:00

I am so happy to be dropping by for a ghost story exchange at my favorite little bookstore in Asheville! My favorite local witch, Byron Ballard, promised to be there, too.

We'll gather at 6 p.m., Friday, February 13, at Accent on Books. 854 Merrimon Avenue, North Asheville, NC 28804. 828-252-6255. For locals, think "Woodfin." :-)

Apologies for the "press release" copied below (for those of you who are tired of seeing my current title Ghost Cats of the South appear on this page time and time again). I was doing Q&A during a live chat festival Sunday night, sponsored by one of the large cat hobbyist websites, and folks wanted to drop by the blog to see what my ghost kitty book was all about.

Ghost Cats of the South press release

2009-02-07T05:08:00.000-08:00

(Written by the editorial staff of John F Blair, Publisher):

You may have heard about Oscar, the cat that makes rounds in a Rhode Island nursing home, just like the doctors. When Oscar senses an elderly resident is near death, he curls up in bed with that person. Sure enough, within a few hours, the resident is gone. Oscar has proven so accurate over the years that staff members now call residents’ families when the cat begins his vigils, to give them advance notice of their loved ones’ deaths.

Don’t believe it? Oscar was written up in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007.

Randy Russell, a student of cat behavior, is hardly surprised by Oscar. Give Russell half a chance and he’ll tell you about cats that can sit in women’s laps and detect that they’re pregnant, cats that can sense the earliest hints of sickness on your breath, cats that can tell you’re hungry five minutes before you realize it yourself.
The makers of Meow Mix recently placed ten homeless felines in a storefront window in New York City and asked passersby to vote the cats one by one out of the “house.” As with any good promotional gimmick, the contest had a catch—the kitties voted out were placed in permanent homes.

Randy Russell can go Meow Mix one better. He’ll tell you about the stone cottage in the mountain town of Sylva, North Carolina, where the delicious smells of baking attracted countless stray cats over the years. Every Halloween, cats would line up on the porch and select the trick-or-treaters with whom they wanted to live. When those lucky children arrived home and examined their treats, they discovered that the kindly old lady in the stone cottage had made them each a special cat cookie that exactly matched the cats that had chosen them, right down to the color of the fur.

Like the Meow Mix promotion, Russell’s tale has a catch—the kindly old lady in the stone cottage was a witch.

In addition to being a student of cat behavior, Russell is a mutli-published author of Southern States folklore, with a special interest in ghosts. For more than a decade, he has lead an annual week-long Ghost Seminar for the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

“Sadly overlooked in published folklore are people’s encounters with the ghosts of past family members of the four-legged variety,” Russell says. “Conversely, visits from departed pets are easily the most common ghost experiences I hear when people share their real-life encounters with me. And cats refuse to be left out of most anything.”

During his travels across the South, Russell has heard tales of a ghost cat who digs for buried treasure on the beach, a ghost cat who fell into a vat of boiling mash and became part of a batch of meowing moonshine, a ghost cat who helps a truck driver rescue a pair of accident victims in an overturned car. Some ghostly cats are devoted enough to help bereaved parents deal with loss. Others are vicious enough to return in the afterlife to take vengeance on cat-killing lawyers and philanderers.
Not wanting such rich folk tales to be lost, Russell has collected them in a new volume called Ghost Cats of the South, a companion to his highly successful Ghost Dogs of the South.

“For me, being asked if I believe in ghosts is the same as being asked if I believe in mountains,” Russell says. “Yes, of course I do. They’re right there."

As for first-person experiences of ghostly cats, Russell has found them highly unpredictable. “Ghost cats, like cats themselves, don’t always behave the way we would want them to,” he says. “But cats are their own reward, of course. Just ask one.”

Kitty Sings to Dead Girl

2009-02-07T04:58:00.000-08:00

While in Newberry, South Carolina I was taken aside and told about a family cat in the local household of a mother who had just lost a young daughter to a fatal illness. The cat and girl had been constant companions throughout the young girl's short life.

The mother told me when she brought her daughter's ashes home, the cat fawned over the urn. It stood on its hind legs and batted at the air above it as if playing with something that was there. And then the cat began to mew and sing as it played.

The cat still does it. The mother thinks the cat is talking to the deceased daughter. I wouldn't disagree. Maybe it's quirky of me, but I like to think the daughter may be talking back. I see no harm in that.

Ghost Cats of the South, by Randy Russell. Have you seen a Ghost?

The Halloween Witch

2009-01-28T16:20:00.000-08:00

This painting has come to be the classic image of the American Halloween witch. The copy shown here was published in 1903 and is truer to the original art than most later copies I have seen. Like the predecessor from 1864 below, it was published as a representation of a witch at (over) Salem Massachusetts in 1692.

By the turn of the century, the Halloween witch in America has moved far toward a rather merry, if not down right mirthful image of witchcraft.