An amazing assortment of twenty—three stories and ten “short shorts” comprise this popular selection. More than merely entertaining, Tar Heel Ghosts captures the “spirit” of North Carolina’s past.
North Carolina’s ghost stories have infinite variety. There are mountainous ghosts and seafaring ghosts; colonial ghosts and modern ghosts; gentle ghosts and roistering ghosts; delicate lady ghosts and fishwife ghosts; home ghosts and ghosts that just want to be noticed. Mysterious signs and symbols appear — small black crosses, galloping white horses, strangely moving lights, floating veils, lifelike apparitions, skulls, dripping blood, and “things that go bump in the night.” At least one North Carolina ghost got himself into a court record, and other ghostly phenomena have attracted scientific investigation.
These stories have a marked realistic North Carolina flavor. The reader finds mountain cabins and antebellum mansions, Indian trails, water wheels, river steamboats, railroad trains, slave labor on plantations, revenuers and stills in the mountains, a burial in St. James Churchyard in Wilmington, Winston—Salem before the days of Winston, Raleigh in the 1860s, Fayetteville during World War II, and even a new suburb haunted by old spooks.