Texas Ghost Stories: Fifty Favorites for the Telling

Storytelling World/Storytelling Magazine Award Winner"I love a book that gives me what it promises, and this one does: fifty real ghost stories, drawn from a variety of sources and told in as many voices, written so as to simulate the language and delivery of a face-to-face performance, and artfully, delightfully done."—Review of Texas Books"Scarcely a page will you turn in this collection of ghost stories in Texas without encountering a disembodied hand or a fang baby—creatures guaranteed to shock the shell of an armadillo. . . . Whether you read the tales out loud or spin them around a campfire, you—and your audience—will be spooked. And you'll never again saunter along a dark, deserted riverbank late at night."—Patti Ross, San Antonio Express-NewsSome humorous, some haunting, and some just late-night terrifying, these stories, gathered by two favorite Texas tellers, span a rich cultural heritage from the earliest Spanish explorers to the present, from La Llorona (the Weeping Woman) to the vanishing hitchhiker. Introduced by John O. West and John L. Davis, two of Texas’ most respected folklorists, the stories include tales adapted by European settlers to their new southwestern settings, more historically rooted legends about such early pioneers as Britt Bailey of the Gulf Coast prairie and Josiah Wilbarger of Austin, and those notorious contemporary cautionary tales known as urban legends.With two appendixes addressing selection, learning, and telling of stories as well as sources and scholarship, Texas Ghost Stories is a full-service compendium for tellers, teachers, readers, and collectors. Celebrating both the blending and the diversity of Texan cultures through the timeless stories we love to be scared by, it is a treasury for all Texans and for those who really want to know us.