Spooky Season Reads

Though Rhode Island is America's smallest state, they have more than their fair share of spooky stories.

Author Rory Raven has collected stories and tales drawn from the history and folklore of one of the oldest cities in the nation. From restless spirits and mysterious deaths, to vampires and shadowy strangers, and even stories involving Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, Haunted Providenceexplores the unusual events and untold tales that have made this capital city unlike any other.

Bowdoin College boasts two centuries in higher education, and that rich history is laden with curious tales and ghostly happenings. Eerie legends about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joshua Chamberlain and other distinguished graduates are still whispered in the halls of their alma mater. A dungeon complete with skulls and skeletons hidden beneath Appleton Hall plays to society's darkest fears about secret college societies. The many untimely deaths at Hubbard Hall lend credence to its haunted reputation. Misfortunes of Coleman Hall residents might have a connection with the building's site atop the remnants of the long-closed Medical School of Maine. Author David Francis reveals Bowdoin's spooky and maybe even ghostly history.

C.C. Carole has visited some of the most historic places in the Merrimack Valley and has found them buzzing with the ghostly energy and presence of those who came before. Join C.C. as she recounts her adventures and paints a historical backdrop of the region's haunts. Discover the legend of the Pennacook chief Passaconaway, said to be over one hundred years old and possessed of magic that could make water burn and trees dance. Investigate the eerie sounds and shadowy figures reported in the old safe houses and tunnels of the Underground Railroad. Visit the Rosewood Country Inn in Bradford and its lingering spirits of glamorous Hollywood stars, and listen for the echoes of toe-tapping performers at Canobie Lake Park's Dancehall Theatre. As C.C. treks across New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the region's historic spirits reveal themselves in surprising ways.

As one of the nation's oldest cities, Cambridge, Massachusetts, has a tumultuous history filled with Revolutionary War beginnings, religious persecution and centuries of debate among Ivy League intelligentsia. It should come as no surprise that the city is also home to spirits that are entangled with the past and now inhabit the dormitories, local watering holes and even military structures of the present. Discover the apparitions that frighten freshmen in Harvard's Weld Hall, the Revolutionary War ghosts that haunt the estates of Tory Row and the flapper who is said to roam the seats of Somerville Theatre. Using careful research and firsthand accounts, author Sam Baltrusis delves into ghastly tales of murder, crime and the bizarre happenings in the early days of Cambridge to uncover the truth behind some of the city's most historic haunts.