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GHOSTS AND WITCHES APLENTY: More Tales Our Settlers Told by Joseph & Edith Raskin

GHOSTS AND WITCHES APLENTY: More Tales Our Settlers Told

By

Pub Date: Aug. 27th, 1973
Publisher: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard

Girls accused of witchcraft, a woman who wills her mill to the devil, poltergeists and disembodied voices and ghostly shapes that may or may not be explained away as wind or moonlit birch or children's mischief -- these are the subjects of the old American lore which the Raskins retell from documents and records with the same homey dispatch that marked their first collection (KR, 1971). Even though the settlers' own uneasy credulity won't be recaptured, except perhaps round a midnight bonfire near the tale's locale, today's readers will be rewarded with an inside view of early America, where skepticism and common sense temper the more notorious grudges and superstition.