The authoritative true story of the notorious deadly chest and the victims of the curse placed on it around 1830. The original letter by Virginia Cary Hudson is researched and published by Dr. Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Virginia's granddaughter and retired Harvard professor.

Beware...this book is cursed! These strange but true stories of the world’s most infamous items will appeal to true believers as well as history buffs, horror fans, and anyone who loves a good spine-tingling tale. They’re lurking in museums, graveyards, and private homes. Their often tragic and always bizarre stories have inspired countless horror movies, reality TV shows, novels, and campfire tales. They’re cursed objects, and all they need to unleash a wave of misfortune is . . . you. Many of these unfortunate items have intersected with some of the most notable events and people in history, leaving death and destruction in their wake. But never before have the true stories of these eerie oddities been compiled into a fascinating and chilling volume. Inside, readers will learn about: • Annabelle the Doll, a Raggedy Ann doll that featured in the horror franchise The Conjuring • The Unlucky Mummy, which is rumored to have sunk the Titanic and kick-started World War I • The Dybbuk box, which was sold on eBay and spawned the horror film The Possession • The Conjured Chest, which has been blamed for fifteen deaths within a single family • The Ring of Silvianus, a Roman artifact believed to have inspired J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit • And many more!

In the early 19th Century, Adelaide Lenormand, a fortune teller popular with the Paris elite, conjures a golem for Napoleon Bonaparte during a dinner party. But something goes wrong. It looks nothing like the manservant she promised. Even worse, immediately after it arrives, the golem steals the Emperor’s Emerald Scarab from a chain around his neck and mysteriously disappears. Minutes later in London, Elise Dubois, an ER nurse from Tucson, is found sprawled in front of The Quiet Woman Public House. She’s wearing nothing but tattered shorts, a sports bra, and one pink running shoe. Gripped in her fist is an Egyptian jewel, the scarab. Now Bonaparte’s Minister of Police is breathing down Adelaide’s neck while her wealthy clients are abandoning her. The women of La Société d’Isis, so wickedly encouraging when she’d first launched her plot, remain silent to her pleas for help. Adelaide has no choice but to find the golem and restore her reputation. Troubled by nightmares of a wild-eyed French woman and worried she might be losing her mind, Elise tries to blend in at the pub. But blending in is not her forte. She knows the moment the opportunity arises she’ll stop at nothing to return to 21st Century Arizona, even if that means breaking the heart of the one man who understands her. The Conjured Woman is the first in the Emerald Scarab Adventure series aimed at lovers of hard-edged heroines. In a story of time travel, romance, and fortune, anything can happen.

Contains over seventy tales of ghostly hauntings from each of the fifty United States and Canada.

Five years ago, three young victims were found murdered, posed like little angels. No witnesses, no evidence left behind. The Sleeping Angel Killer called his despicable acts 'the perfect crimes.' The case nearly destroyed homicide detective Kitt Lundgren's career— because she let the killer get away. Now the Sleeping Angel Killer is back. But Kitt notices something different about this new rash of killings— a tiny variation that suggests a copycat killer may be re-creating the original 'perfect crimes.' Then the unthinkable happens. The Sleeping Angel Killer himself approaches Kitt with a bizarre offer: he will help her catch his copycat. Kitt must decide whether to place her trust in a murderer—or risk falling victim to a fiend who has taken the art of the perfect murder to horrific new heights.

“A brave and moving novel [that] has a tender empathy with the natural world.” —Hermione Lee, The New York Review of Books From the two-time Booker Prize finalist author of Days Without End comes a dazzling companion novel about memory and identity, set in Tennessee in the aftermath of the Civil War Winona Cole, an orphaned child of the Lakota Indians, finds herself growing up in an unconventional household on a farm in west Tennessee. Raised by her adoptive parents John Cole and Thomas McNulty, whose story Barry told in his acclaimed previous novel Days Without End, she forges a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past. Tennessee is a state still riven by the bitter legacy of the Civil War, and the fragile harmony of her family is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand. Exquisitely written, A Thousand Moons is a stirring, poignant story of love and redemption, of one woman's journey and her determination to write her own future.

An engaging and enchanting journey into a world of letters that will inspire and edify all those who love writing. Jerome Groopman, MD, Recanati Professor, Harvard Medical School, coauthor with Dr. Pamela Hartzband, "Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What is Right for You." Beverly Mayne Kienzle grew up surrounded by papers and manuscripts containing the remarkable writings of her grandmother Virginia Cary Hudson Cleveland, still unpublished at her death in 1954. Beverly's mother, Virginia Cleveland Mayne, devoted herself to publishing those works. That manuscript, O Ye Jigs and Juleps!, sold for $2.50 and made its firstof sixty-sixappearances on the New York Times Best Sellers list on May 27, 1962, and three other books followed. Kienzle now returns to her roots and tells the story her mother started but never finished, the biography of Virginia Cary Hudson, a "girl who grew up preaching." In this authoritative biography, Virginia Cary Hudson, Kienzle recounts the career and family life of Virginia Cary Hudson. With warmth and humor, she reveals her grandmother's incisive observations of humankind, from simple folk to big-time gamblers, in places from Kentucky to Havana and Las Vegas. The letters and the scrapbook Beverly's grandmother completed for her, with its charming poems and drawings, appear in print for the first time, as does the narrative that Beverly's mother began in order to tell the poignant story of publishing a best seller.