Ed Southern, The Devil’s Done Come Back: New Ghost Tales from North Carolina, in discussion with Ross White

“This book has everything: the sudden haunting chill in the air, the garrulous severed head, and those campfire-scary-as-all-get-out twist endings that only ghost stories can get away with these days.”—Daniel Wallace, Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars and Big Fish

Fifteen of North Carolina’s finest writers reimagine and reclaim the stories of the ghosts who have haunted all corners of the state.

North Carolina ain’t what it once was: forests and fields have given way to suburbs and vacation homes, textile mills to high tech, tobacco farms to tourism. That doesn’t mean, though, that the ghosts of the Old North State have gone away.

In this anthology, readers might glimpse some of the ghostly apparitions, headless fiends, and creepy hollers they heard about around their childhood campfires. Now, fifteen of the state’s finest contemporary prose writers and poets have reimagined these stories—bringing us fresh tales that are bound to scare the living daylights out of us all over again.

The Devil’s Done Come Back reclaims these old ghost tales as living stories, told and retold to frighten and delight.

Contributors include: Michele Tracy Berger on the ghosts of the Great Dismal Swamp, Wiley Cash (and his daughters) on the Maco Light, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle on the Raven Mockers, Tyree Daye on family hauntings, Jeremy B. Jones on the phantasms of Chimney Rock, Ed Southern on the Jack Tales and the Devil’s Tramping Ground, Ross White on the Little Red Man of Old Salem, and many more.

Editor Ed Southern is the author of Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South, The Jamestown Adventure, Voices of the American Revolution in the Carolinas, and the short-story collection Parlous Angels. His work has appeared in South Writ Large, The Bitter Southerner, the North Carolina Literary Review, the Asheville Poetry Review, StorySouth, and elsewhere. Since 2008, he has been the executive director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. He lives in Winston-Salem, NC.

Ross White is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry, and three chapbooks: How We Came Upon the Colony, The Polite Society, and Valley of Want. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and The Southern Review, among others. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-hosts The Chapbook, a podcast devoted to tiny, delightful collections.