Appalachian Halloween, Haints, & Mountain Stories
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Stories are a long tradition in Appalachia, and in my family too. People recount haints and spooks they met in the woods and along the ridge, and the tale does a job even if you do not take the spook as fact. East Tennessee is also home to the storytelling capital of the world, Jonesborough, where the National Storytelling Festival brings famous and local tellers in every year. Halloween and fall weather ask for a good story or two. Here are a few Story Parlor treasures for the season.
Old Stories of Halloween Growing up in Rural Appalachia
A thirteen-minute porch telling. Church parties, apple bobbing, pumpkins out of somebody’s garden, homemade costumes, a grandmother’s witch on the ridge, and Raw Head and Bloody Bones in a hollow tree. Mischief, firelight, and the way the night used to be kept in a coal camp and a small mountain town.
Mountain Talk: 'Haint' Tales & Spooky Stories
An Appalshop and WMMT hour made for Halloween, told by mountain people rather than a host. A spirit in a 1930s Letcher County logging camp, a hungry witch at a remote fire, a bossy ghost, and a blue light remembered by banjo player Morgan Sexton. Florida Slone and Ray Hicks are in the room.
Told by the Wind
A short Appalshop film on why these stories get told. Locals talk through doors, voices, and lights, and the piece stays with the idea that a haint tale was often how a community placed an event. One segment recounts a violent killing.
Appalachia’s Storyteller: The Woods
J.D. Phillips in the old cadence, eight minutes. A boy sent up the ridge under a harvest moon meets a man with no head and watches him walk into the graveyard oak.
Appalachia After Dark: TRUE Appalachian MYSTERIES
Opens in harvest time, a child seeing an old woman’s face while the corn is coming in, and then tells the Greenbrier Ghost. In 1896 a West Virginia community treated a dead woman’s reported testimony as real enough to open a grave, and a court finished what the story started.
