Visions of the Future - Halloween in the VT Folklife Archive, 2024
Spooky Season is upon us! As a part of our partnership with Local Learning and the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program we recently discovered a wonderful description of a turn-of-the-century Halloween fortune telling game in the VT Folklife Archive. In 1984, Daisy Turner of Grafton, VT shared an account of her sister, Wilhelmina, using the Magic of Halloween to discover the identity of her true love!
The Manchester Vampire - Legends & Lore
In 1792 Rachel Harris Burton of Manchester was exhumed from her grave and partially burned out of fear she had become vampire. Rachel, and the citizens of Manchester, were caught up in a vampire panic that spread through New England during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a panic with two documented cases in Vermont, first in Manchester and then again over 40 years later in Woodstock.
A Haunted Gingerbread House?
The theme for this year's annual Gingerbread House Exhibit and Competition is A Christmas Carol: Revisiting the English Tradition of Ghost Stories During the Holidays. Some of you have no doubt been wondering: what the heck do ghost stories have to do with the winter holidays?