Stories about the dead—the dead dead—often fade away over time, but there’s something about ghost stories that has staying power. Maybe it’s the way that such stories activate our otherwise suppressed connection to the liminal and unknown. But there’s also something strangely localizing about a good haunting, reminding us that the places where we live are textured with past stories.
“The phrase that keeps coming to mind—it’s such a terrible pun, but it’s that ghost stories have a weird power to bring a particular place alive,” the writer Ed Southern says, a little ruefully. “For me, reading ghost stories as a child was my first introduction to North Carolina as a place, you know? The first time I began thinking about the whole state as my home, as opposed to just the town where I live.”
The new collection, The Devil’s Done Come Back: New Ghost Tales from North Carolina, is a fresh take on such stories. Out from Durham publisher Blair and edited by Southern, a slate of contemporary North Carolina writers, including Wiley Cash, Julia Ridley Smith, Tyree Daye, and Ross White, reimagine classic stories from around the state, ranging from early colonial lore like Virginia Dare to Western North Carolina phenomena like the Brown Mountain lights.
Weaving throughout the collection is “The House of Vine and Shadow,” a ghost story that rings particularly true, about a man visiting an elderly couple and attempting to persuade them to sell their land to a developer—only to find himself physically locked into their stories about the Tar Heel State and reminded of what’s at stake when we try to thoughtlessly bypass the past. On the heels of the book’s September publication, the INDY spoke with Southern about what makes a good ghost story.
INDY: What was the genesis of this collection?
Ed Southern: To be honest, I got stuck on another project that I was working on, and whenever I get stuck writing, I turn to reading. And the thing that I’ve been trying to work on grew, to some extent, out of North Carolina folklore, so I decided to go back and read these ghost story collections that I’ve loved as a child. In doing that, I realized that these stories were overdue to be updated—to be reimagined and retold for another generation.
What kind of stories do you think readers might be familiar with? What are some of the big standout North Carolina ghost stories?
If someone comes to this book and they’re already a fan of North Carolina folklore or North Carolina ghost stories, then most, if not all, of the stories in here will be familiar. We have a lot of the old standbys: Virginia Dare in the Lost Colony, Blackbeard. We’ve got the Devil’s Tramping Ground, of course, we’ve got the Brown Mountain lights.
And then there are a few that are a little more—I don’t want to say, obscure, but they don’t show up in all of the North Carolina history textbooks, like the Chimney Rock phantasms, the ghost riders of Chimney Rock. Jeremy Jones has a great take on those in this anthology. There’s the Raven Mockers, which are part of Cherokee folklore—Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle wrote a great story around those. And then one of the biggest departures is that Mark Powell took a legend of a phantom hitchhiker and turned it into a phantom river rafting, which was a lot of fun.
There’s a mix of poetry and fiction. Why did it feel important to have a blend of genres in the book?
Honestly, I didn’t plan that. I had asked Ross White, a wonderful poet in Durham, to give me his take on the Little Red Man, the ghost in Old Salem. [White] has deep roots in Winston-Salem, going back—his family can trace their tree all the way back to Old Salem. I thought he would give me a story like everyone else, and instead, he turned in this wonderful poem, “Bring Forth a Beauteous Heav’nly Light.” I remembered poems that I’ve read before by Tyree Daye and Julie Funderburk that involve ghosts, and asked if we could use those. And then Ross, I guess he was just inspired—he turned in a couple more poems about ghosts for the anthology.
Writers go rogue. You can’t pin them down.
Exactly—it was, to quote the late, great Bob Ross, “a happy little accident.”
There’s a four-part story throughout the book that structures it—can you tell me more about that story?
If there’s any one inspiration for it, it’s a house that I passed, driving out of Charlotte one time—this was years ago, and I saw this forlorn little farmhouse sitting on the side of Highway 16 with this never-ending blitz of traffic going by, as Charlotte continued to expand. I was driving by at 50 miles an hour, and it was a quick sight that just kind of lodges in your imagination.
I came up with it in response to my publisher’s question about writing an introduction to the book, and the more I thought about it, the less confident I felt about trying to explain all these stories. And I thought: “Well, I think a story would be the best way to introduce the themes of the book, such as they are, and set the stage for the stories that the reader is about to encounter.”
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