Tells the stories of ghosts, meteorites, lost tribes, sunken cities, cults, and UFOs.

Mabel Aphrodite Brown unpacks her knives—and her detective skills—when she joins a cooking competition that someone would kill to win . . . Somehow, Ditie’s best friend, Lurleen, has sweet-talked Ditie into a spot on the next edition of The Great Southern Baking Contest. It’ll mean leaving her almost-adopted kids for a little while, but they love spending time with their uncle. And she can’t turn down the chance to bake at celebrity chef Savanah Evans’s antebellum estate in Beaufort, South Carolina . . . Even when Savanah’s husband dies suspiciously at the welcome party, the show doesn’t stop. As technical problems plague filming and the body count rises faster than a soufflé, it becomes clear that everyone is hiding more than just biscuit recipes. It’s up to Ditie to sift through a slew of suspects and motives to cut through a mystery with more layers than her Georgia peach strudel. If she doesn’t come through with a killer soon, she might get chopped—from real life. Includes Family-Friendly Recipes!

From backwaters as dark as a cypress swamp to nooks as mysterious as a musty college library, southerners have conjured spirits and told ghost stories. Shadows and Cypress: Southern Ghost Stories is a Dixie séance that summons ghost tales from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Collecting more than a dozen stories from each state, this book channels the South's entire panorama of creepy locales into one volume. The limestone caves of Kentucky, the swamps of Louisiana and Florida, the pine hills and hollows of Appalachia, and the plains of Texas—these are perfect haunts for a host of narratives about visitors from the spirit world. The many cultures that converged in the American South enriched the region's ghost stories. Shadows and Cypress taps African American, French, Hispanic, and Scotch-Irish storytelling traditions to capture the distinctive signatures that each has left on ghostlore. Throughout the region, the southern ghost story is hardly a curio from the crypt. It is still alive and well. Folklorist Alan Brown draws stories from crannies as contemporary as the college dormitory or cars parked on a lover's lane. To give the reader the unique experience of hearing a classic ghost story told, Brown presents these tales exactly as they were recorded in his field research or as archived in the trove of the WPA oral collections. A wide variety of specters found only in this region arise in Shadows and Cypress. The “fillet” and “loogaroo” from Louisiana, “plat-eye” from South Carolina, and “haints” from across Dixie are among the creatures bumping in the night. Beginning with the Revolutionary War and continuing to the present day, this generous gathering of tales will chill and delight readers and long haunt shelves as a comprehensive sourcebook of the region's supernatural allure.

In almost every town in America there are places where strange things happen. The perfect companion to The International Directory of Haunted Places, this revised and updated edition of Haunted Places is both a fascinating and unusual travel guide as well as an indispensable casebook for those interested in the paranormal. From buildings and parks believed to have resident ghosts and poltergeists to areas where Bigfoot or UFO sightings are most frequently reported, Haunted Places will lead you to more than 2,000 sites of paranormal activity across the United States. Organized alphabetically by state, each entry is referenced to an extensive bibliography of sources-with descriptions, addresses, phone numbers, Web sites, and travel directions provided for all locations.

Comprehensive collection of unexplained phenomena, science mysteries and historical oddities ranging from Big Bang and Killer comets to poltergeist and alien abductions.

In the South, mystery comes heaped with added richness. And in this collection of comfort food for the curious mind, author Alan Brown guides readers into the most delightful medley of mystery the South has on offer. Witches in Tennessee. The devil's hoofprints in North Carolina. Voodoo in New Orleans. In this South, meat rains from the sky in Bath, Kentucky. A professor's thigh makes the case for spontaneous combustion in Nashville. UFO-induced radiation sickness befalls Huffman, Texas. From bluesman Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil in Arkansas to the oak tree that defends the innocence of a man executed in Mobile, sometimes the inexplicable is truly the most satisfying.

Goes behind headlines and datelines to explore disturbing truth behind 40 famous and not-so-famous supernatural occurrence from around the world. truth behind 40 famous and not-so-famous supermatural occurrence from the around the world.