North Carolina's Haunted Hundred Volume 1: Seaside Spectres

Daniel W. Barefoot’s colleagues in the North Carolina General Assembly call him their “resident historian.” Now, he’s their resident folklorist, too. North Carolina’s Haunted Hundred, Barefoot’s three-volume series, is a sampler of the diverse supernatural history of the Tar Heel State. One story is drawn from each of the state’s hundred counties. You’ll find tales of ghosts, witches, demons, spook lights, unidentified flying objects, unexplained phenomena, and more. Many of the stories have never before been widely circulated in print. Seaside Spectrescontains 33 tales from the state’s coastal region. In “The Cursed Town,” the Beaufort County story, you’ll read about the curse laid on Bath by an eighteenth-century preacher—a curse from which the town has never recovered. In “Terrors of the Swamp,” the Camden County story, you’ll learn of unexplained happenings in the Great Dismal Swamp—mysterious lights, a ghostly haunting from the American Revolution, and an awful creature called the Dismal Swamp Freak. In “The Fraternity of Death,” the New Hanover County tale, you’ll meet the nineteenth-century cult whose members mocked the Last Supper and died under mysterious circumstances soon afterward, inspiring a story by Robert Louis Stephenson.