This Tuesday I have two more books of local ghost lore to share, both fun and easy and focused on beautiful dangerous places.
First we’ve got Yellowstone Ghosts Stories. I went to Yellowstone once and found it profoundly beautiful and deeply creepy. Strolling around next to lethally hot pools of acid water unsettled me more than any ghost story I’ve come across. This book isn’t full of fatalities, though. It’s mostly full of colorful history and legends from the Yellowstone area. It definitely leans farther toward history than ghosts but the author, Shellie Larios, seems to be a true believer. More than once she mentions running around hotels and cornering employees to ask about apparitions and strange noises. It makes for a fun book overall.
I’ve saved the best for last, though, with Glen Grant’s Chicken Skin tales. This one explores folk tales and urban legends from the islands, often told to him firsthand by locals eager to share their stories. All of the tales are feel cleaned up and embellished for publication–many of them have endings too neat and clear to be real–but they’re engagingly told and really show off the different beliefs and cultures that make Hawaii unique. Most of the stories are steeped in native Hawaiian beliefs and Asian folklore, often clashing and blending in entertaining ways.
From what I hear, Hawaii is amazing and no one needs extra ghostly reasons to visit. Still, this book paints us a picture of Hawaii as a haunted place full of gods, ghosts, and occasionally terrifying wonders. Now I want to visit even more but I’m not sure I want to drive their highways at night. They seem to be crawling with ghosts.
