Patapsco Spirits

About the Book A bohemian artist obsessed with a lonely woodland pond haunted by preternatural beings… an old man and his grandson who maintain their strong connection after the former’s death… a revenant summoned for vengeance through a carefully guarded secret “conjuring song”… a priest mysteriously called upon to rescue the soul of a woman guilty of a decades-old brutal murder… These are just some of the stories told in this chilling collection. All the tales are set in the early 1960s, in the region surrounding Maryland’s long and twisting Patapsco River—a terrain known for its dark lore and eerie locations. And although the setting is a well-known waterway in the United States, the spiritual entities teeming in these pages are the demons, faeries, ghosts, shape-shifters, goblins, fetches, tricksters, sprites, elementals, and angels that have occupied our phantasmal folklore for millennia. Here, then, are eleven stories to unsettle, disturb, and—we hope—entertain the reader.