The Folklife Portal:
The Supernatural
Ghost stories, vampire legends, and more!
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!
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.
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?
Halloween Stories on the VT Untapped Podcast
It’s the 2021 VT Untapped Spooky Halloween Special! This year we teamed up with our friends at Vermont Public Radio and put out a call to all Vermonters, inviting them to get in touch and tell us their scariest ghostly encounters and supernatural sightings.
It’s the 2020 VT Untapped Spooky Halloween Special! Are you brave enough to descend the creaking stairs down to the depths of the VFC archive as we dust off an old tape and listen to Floyd Cowdrey tell us about the most haunted of Vermont houses?
This month on VT Untapped we hear spooky stories told by Kim Chase of Essex Junction. Kim is a second-generation, bilingual Franco-American and the stories she shares were passed down through generations of her family members. Gather round Kim’s rocking chair and listen up. Don’t be too scared!