Folklore

Legends, ghosts and witches, superstitions, storytelling and jack tales, rhymes and riddles

Brown, Roberta Simpson, and Lonnie E. Brown.  2013.  Kentucky Hauntings: Homespun Ghost Stories and Unexplained History.  Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.  174 pp.

Douglas, John.  2013.  A Fog of Ghosts: Haunted Tales & Odd Pieces.  Berkeley Springs, W. Va.: Blind Spring Press.  232 pp.  Stories from Hancock, Cumberland, and Morgan counties, Md., and parts of adjacent Va. and W. Va.  Douglas is a mystery writer and longtime local newspaper editor.

Emerson, D. Berton.  2013.  “‘It’s Good to Be Shifty’: The Local Democracies of Old Southwestern Humor.”  American Literature 85, no. 2 (June): 273-301.  Considers three books including Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a Durn’d Fool (1867), by George Washington Harris.

Guiley, Rosemary.  2014.  The Big Book of West Virginia Ghost Stories.  Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole.  280 pp.  One hundred accounts of hauntings.

Hilliard, Emily.  2016.  “The State Folklorist’s Notebook: What Is Folklore?”  Goldenseal: West Virginia Traditional Life 42, no. 2 (Summer): 6-7.  The author is West Virginia’s first official state folklorist and will be writing a regular column for Goldenseal.

McGowan, Thomas, and Elizabeth Williams.  2013.  “Jack and the Camera: The Depiction of Ray Hicks in Film and Video” [d. 2003].  North Carolina Folklore Journal 59, no. 2 (Fall-Winter): 28-63.

Medvec, Gerard J.  2013.  Mid-Atlantic UFOs: High Traffic Area.  Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer.  128 pp.  Accounts of sightings and encounters in eight states, from N.Y. to W. Va. and Va.

Musick, Ruth Ann, and Walter Barnes, comp.  2013.  Mountain Mother Goose: Child Lore of West Virginia.  Edited by Judy Byers; illustrated by Patricia Musick, Noel Tenney, and John Henry Randolph.  Fairmont, W. Va.: Fairmont State University Press.  354 pp.  Barnes (1880-1969) and his mentee, Musick (1897-1974), were avid  oral historians and collectors of folklore.  Eight chapters of jingles and rhymes, games, riddles, lesson tales, jump rope rhymes, play-party games, and more.

Newton, Michael.  2015.  Strange West Virginia Monsters.  Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer.  192 pp.

Ritter, William.  2015.  “Acting the Fool.”  North Carolina Folklore Journal 62, no. 2 (Summer-Fall): 57-74.  Ritter’s essay on the historiography of the Appalachian fool, trickster, storyteller interweaves a narrative bibliography beginning with Sandra Ballard and Anthony Harkins and ending with Cratis Williams’s Tales From Sacred Wind(McFarland, 2003).

Sturges, Mark.  2015.  “Legends of the Susquehanna: Frontier Narratives and the Folkloric Sense of Place.”  Pennsylvania History 82, no. 4 (Autumn): 489-515.  “...set in the Susquehanna Valley during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the historical legends of Juniata Jack and Cherry Tree Joe McCreery.”

White, Thomas.  2013.  Witches of Pennsylvania: Occult History & Lore.  Charleston, S.C.: History Press.  110 pp.  Ghost stories, monsters, tall tales.