Find stories of magic and witches, sailors, pirates and shipwrecks and more in this book filled with folks with great stories and interesting lives. Author and Marblehead Museum & Historical Society director Pam Peterson recounts the oral and written accounts that Marbleheaders have handed down over the past 400 years. Compiled with meticulous care, Marblehead Myths, Legends and Lore offers a diverse sampling of tales from one of New England's maritime treasures.

Agnes Surriage, it turns out, was more Pygmalion than Cinderella. Her role models were the fiercely independent "codfish widows, "? wives of the early Marblehead fishermen who managed home and family seven months a year without their husbands. In Agnes's version of My Fair Lady, she had to act as her own Henry Higgins while making the often painful transformation from "girl of all works"? at the Fountain Inn to the charming and dignified Lady Agnes, wife of Sir Charles Henry Frankland. After deconstructing the legend for twenty-five years, author F. Marshall Bauer has unearthed a story of money, lust and vindication.

Among Massachusetts's many treasures is Boston, a city rich in culture and history. Haunted Boston, a collection of stories of ghosts, mysteries, and paranormal happenings in Beantown, will leave readers delightfully frightened.

It’s no surprise that the historic Massachusetts seaport’s history is checkered with violence and heinous crimes. Originally called Naumkeag, Salem means “peace.” However, as its historical legacy dictates, the city was anything but peaceful during the late seventeenth century. Did the reputed Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, strike in Salem? Evidence supports the possibility of a copy-cat murder. From the recently pinpointed gallows where innocents were hanged for witchcraft to the murder house on Essex Street where Capt. Joseph White was bludgeoned to death and then stabbed thirteen times in the heart, Sam Baltrusis explores the ghost lore and the people behind the tragic events that turned the “Witch City” into a hot spot that has become synonymous with witches, rakes, and rogues.

New England boasts some of the strangest characters and stories that ever graced a region. From ghosts blessing a marriage to a clairvoyant who raised the dead, mysterious happenings abound. There is the simple grave of the mysterious and anonymous "XYZ" and the extravagant monument built for a pauper. One man may have actually found the elixir of immortality, while another woman left her whole fortune to a spirit she met via a Ouija board. Stories of the Melon Heads, the Leather Man and the Old Coot of Mount Greylock have fascinated New Englanders for years. Join Tom D'Agostino and Arlene Nicholson as they unveil the mysteries and oddities of this unique region.

Like leaves in the wind, the lives of seven generations of the Elwell Family were driven by early American history to progress and peril. Fourteen years after the Mayflower, Robert Elwell landed at the Massachusetts Bay Colony and prospered in one of the first settlements in the New World. His children fought in the first Indian War and endured the Salem Witch Trials. A new frontier in West Jersey became a refuge and starting point for a westward migration that lasted for over a century. Patriot Thomas Elwell sought his fortune on the Allegheny frontier. He survived eight years of Revolutionary War service including combat in northern battles, a winter at Valley Forge and the southern campaign leading to Yorktown. Thomas married and moved west to Fort Cumberland to welcome troops mustering to put down the Whiskey Rebellion before homesteading in Ohio's Knox County. His children pushed westward to build lives in the new Northwest Territory before their children fought in the Civil War.

Salem witchcraft will always have a magnetic pull on the American psyche. During the 1692 witch trials, more than 150 people were arrested. An estimated 25 million Americans—including author Diane Foulds—are descended from the twenty individuals executed. What happened to our ancestors? Death in Salem is the first book to take a clear-eyed look at this complex time, by examining the lives of the witch trial participants from a personal perspective. Massachusetts settlers led difficult lives; every player in the Salem drama endured hardships barely imaginable today. Mercy Short, one of the “bewitched” girls, watched as Indians butchered her parents; Puritan minister Cotton Mather outlived all but three of his fifteen children. Such tragedies shaped behavior and, as Foulds argues, ultimately played a part in the witch hunt’s outcome. A compelling “who’s who” to Salem witchcraft, Death in Salem profiles each of these historical personalities as it asks: Why was this person targeted?