Spooky Season Reads

A Fabulous Fable of the Supernatural Kind

The saga of the Morristown ghost has been told around campfires and dinner tables in Morris County for generations. Local legend claimed British Loyalists secretly buried stolen Patriot treasure on Schooley Mountain as they fled the oncoming forces of George Washington during the Revolutionary War. Years later in 1788, a former school teacher from Connecticut, Ransford Rodgers, convinced local prominent Morristown families that a ghost was protecting the true location of the treasure and he alone could exercise it. Little did the victims know, Rodgers was perpetuating an elaborate hoax and eventually extorted large sums of money from the embarrassed local elite. The tale has been recounted in various sensational pamphlets and publications ever since, leaving behind a mystery of what is true or myth.

Author Peter Zablocki separates fact from fiction in the story of the great Morristown ghost hoax.

"Show me your cemeteries, and I will tell you what kind of people you have.'?- Benjamin Franklin

Discover the historic haunts and frightful specters that make the city of brotherly love a haven for unexplained phenomena.

Author Josh Hitchens details the spooky stories of Philadelphia's past and present.

Bloody battlefields and raucous taverns in Connecticut served as the backdrop for pivotal figures and bold actions vital to the American Revolution. Nathan Hale is said to still conduct lessons in New London and East Haddam, and many suspect that George Washington occasionally visits the Shaw Mansion and Fairfield's Sun Tavern. The presence of notorious traitor Benedict Arnold is often felt in the Leffingwell Inn and at Ye Antientist Burial Ground in New London, where he commanded troops numbering 1,600 as a newly turned Loyalist. Picnickers claim to see apparitions of wounded soldiers seated among them at Fort Griswold in Groton. Step foot into a time when the Sons of Liberty, Tories and Patriots changed the course of history as author Courtney McInvale uncovers the Revolutionary haunts of Connecticut.

Author Sharon Pajka guides readers a spine-tingling journey through the Old Dominion’s haunted cemeteries. An eerie din provides the soundtrack at Arlington Cemetery, while the gauzy visage of a lady in red flits among heroes’ gravestones. Civil War soldiers meet in perpetual conflict at Mount Hebron Cemetery, and Thomas Jefferson’s restive spirit makes itself known at Monticello. From the ghost that haunted Hollywood Cemetery for months after the Capitol disaster in 1870 to multiple presidential tombs throughout the state where visitors routinely catch a chill, souls find eternal rest to be a fleeting notion in Virginia. Join author Sharon Pajka on a spine-tingling journey of haunted cemeteries throughout the Old Dominion.