A bohemian artist obsessed with a lonely woodland pond haunted by preternatural beings… an old man and his grandson who maintain their strong connection after the former’s death… a revenant summoned for vengeance through a carefully guarded secret “conjuring song”… a priest mysteriously called upon to rescue the soul of a woman guilty of a decades-old brutal murder… These are just some of the stories told in this chilling collection. All the tales are set in the early 1960s, in the region surrounding Maryland’s long and twisting Patapsco River—a terrain known for its dark lore and eerie locations. And although the setting is a well-known waterway in the United States, the spiritual entities teeming in these pages are the demons, faeries, ghosts, shape-shifters, goblins, fetches, tricksters, sprites, elementals, and angels that have occupied our phantasmal folklore for millennia. Here, then, are eleven stories to unsettle, disturb, and—we hope—entertain the reader.
Praise
“In this well-crafted and enchanting collection of stories, Addison Hart entices us with glimmers of the preternatural, then slowly lifts the thin veil separating it from the ordinary world of experience. Not to scare or horrify, but—with intimations of a spirit-world on the other side of an invisible partition—to enchant. Hart leads us to encounters in magical, haunted places, and introduces us to ghostly presences ‘suspended between the mundane and the miraculous.’ So expertly does Hart weave his stories that the reader can sense those presences, making it easy to suspend disbelief.”
—KENNETH GARCIA
author of the award-winning Pilgrim River: A Spiritual Memoir
“If you ever wondered how M. R. James might have written had he been a modern American, look no further. In this marvelous collection of ghostly tales, Addison Hodges Hart frightens, enchants, and occasionally instructs—without ever descending to the didactic. As with any tellers of ghost stories who succeed at their craft, Hart deals not only with the unseen, but with the intensely regional—in this case a part of Maryland that is close to Baltimore in mileage, but even now far away in soul. These tales are all the more thrilling and real for being squarely set in a moral universe.”
—CHARLES A. COULOMBE
author of Haunted Places in America, editor of Classic Horror Stories
“In this collection of tales, Addison Hodges Hart renews a venerable literary tradition: the Christian ghost story. For, indeed, what you find here are tales both otherworldly and unapologetically Christian. Every one of them is a delight.”
—MICHAEL MARTIN, author of Sophia in Exile, editor of Jesus the Imagination
About the Author
ADDISON HODGES HART is the author of ten previous books, including nine volumes of non-fiction and a novel, Confessions of the Antichrist, published by Angelico Press. His most recent book, also published by Angelico Press, is The Voyage of Life: The Sacred Vision of Thomas Cole (2023), a work combining art history, philosophy, spirituality, and biography. A native of Ellicott City, Maryland, he has drawn on his own experience of that region in writing this collection of spooky tales. He currently resides in Norway. (He also has a lively, easy-to-access Substack page, The Pragmatic Mystic, that deals with topics related to his books.)
