America’s Most Gothic: When History Becomes the Haunting

Welcome back to Haunted History Chronicles.

In today's episode, we're peeling back the velvet curtain of the Gothic,

that brooding,

shadowed realm of fog, drenched mansions,

whispered secrets and restless spirits to uncover the truth behind the stories that continue to haunt America's imagination.

Joining me are two exceptional guests,

Andrea Janes and Liana Renee Heber,

the Bram Stoker Award nominated authors behind A haunted history of Invisible Women and their latest book release,

America's Most Gothic Haunted History. Stranger than fiction.

Andrea James is the founder of Boroughs of the Dead,

New York City's premier ghost tour company,

where she weaves the city's eerie past into living, breathing tales of the supernatural.

Her fascination with witches,

ghosts and forgotten women's stories has made her one of the most captivating voices in modern Gothic storytelling.

Liana is an award winning novelist,

actress and playwright celebrated for her Gothic Victorian fantasy series,

Strangely Beautiful Eterna Files and the Spectral City.

A passionate historian of the Gothic tradition,

Liana brings her theatrical flair and deep knowledge of the macabre to every story she tells.

Together,

Andrea and Liana guide us through America's most Gothic,

a haunting exploration of the real histories that inspired the genre's most enduring tropes.

Cursed families,

haunted houses,

dangerous patriarchs, and women fighting for agency in worlds built to confine them.

Blending meticulous research with ghostly lore,

they reveal how the Gothic mirrors our cultural fears,

from trauma and isolation to power and survival.

So light your candle,

draw the curtains tight and prepare for a journey through America's haunted heart,

where fact and fiction blur and every shadow tells a story.

Tonight,

we're stepping into America's Most Gothic.

Hi ladies. Thank you so much for coming back onto the podcast to talk about your latest book offering.

You're very welcome. Thank you for having us.

We're so glad to be back. Thank you.

Do you want to begin by maybe just helping to define the Gothic as a genre in terms of,

you know, what its key tenants are and maybe why you chose that through which to explore the accounts that you do so brilliantly in the book.

The reason for choosing Gothic as sort of a lens by which to examine these stories was because our follow up proposal to Kensington was okay.

We want to write about some more women.

And Kensington was like, okay, great,

but let's not have a book that competes with the first one. Let's have one that dives into a lot of the aspects that are actually already in this proposal. So there was a section within this, our follow up proposal, that was very, very Gothic literature focused.

And so our editor was recognizing that there are trends happening right now in fiction globally, and one of those trends is a resurgence of the Gothic as a genre.

And because the Gothic always presses its finger on the pulse of the anxieties of the age in which it is written, and we are in a currently globally anxious time,

it is quite fitting to be a part of the Gothic zeitgeist right now.

And so we were able to really lean into that and still keep a focus on a great deal of women at the core of the storytelling. Because if we know anything about a Gothic novel, it is that there is a woman running from a house.

There is women in peril at the core of Gothic literature is really core.

I am sure that your listeners are familiar with the general classics of Gothic literature, but we'll just start it with a certain starting point, which is 1764, which is the literary scholars believe to be the first truly Gothic novel marketed as such, billed as such by Horace Walpole with Castle of Otranto.

And then it kind of went from there, um, always again keeping its finger on the pulse of the anxieties of the age.

So lots of things have Gothic elements, but you have to have a certain amount of Gothic elements in play for, in. In order for it to be a Gothic. And I have a personal shorthand that I've been using when I talk about Gothic literature and its importance through the years.

And my shorthand is that setting is character. So I have. I have three core requirements. Setting his character.

Psychological focus and dread is the engine of the Gothic.

So you have to have an atmospheric place and it does not necessarily have to be a house. Very often in Gothic literature, the house is named,

but it does not have to be a house. We have lots of examples of things that are just Gothic in feel and in tone and in a much wider setting.

And then the psychological focus,

because the narrators are very often in peril and we are really very deeply, emotionally going through what they're going through.

And emotions are big,

stakes are big,

and the narrators can sometimes be unreliable in those very stressful situations.

And then dread being the engine of the narrative and dread being the engine of the Gothic for me is that it's that slow, creeping burn that very often the Gothic will be very subtle out of the corner of your eye.

It's building,

it's building its tension. It's not a jump scare kind of genre. It is very much a creeping dread.

And that's kind of how a lot of things will happen sort of in the anxieties of society too. Those things will build.

So between atmosphere and power, dynamics and the narrative being one that is fraught,

those are the core things that we believe have to be in a Gothic for it to be a Gothic, other than just the vibes of Gothic elements.

Yeah. And I think there's this, like.

It's very funny because with the Gothic, there's this sort of established. Like, this is what it is. You know, there's the.

Is it. Eve Sedgwick, who's back in the 70s, was like, you know, the Gothic has to have,

you know, priests and subterranean spaces and families with,

you know, secrets and. And crypts and all these things. So she has this. Everybody has this kind of idea of what the Gothic is. And then there's this funny sort of thing that the Gothic does where people will kind of have their own personal tenets of the Gothic that they think,

like, this is. It has to be this. So, you know, there's some people that say there has to be entrapment, there has to be enclosure.

Some will say there has to be innocence in peril, there has to be an element of incest. Like, everybody has the thing that they cling to the most with the Gothic.

So it's both firmly established as what it is, but also highly malleable and debatable as well.

And for me,

that is actually the essence of the Gothic. The fact that ruptures anything that you might consider to be knowable,

anything that you might consider.

I can pin this down, define it and put a wall around it, is going to break through that.

So for me, the fundamental tenet of the Gothic is this kind of, like,

disobedience and this, like, subversion, where it's like, oh, did you think linear time was a hard, fixed reality? It's not like it's. So that's what I love about the Gothic is it's just endlessly subversive and it.

It spins you around in so many. It's very disorienting.

So, you know, that's like, again, let me add my take to the 10 million takes that are already out there already.

I think it's a. It's a subversion and a disorientation of. Of everything that you thought was real,

whether it's history, culture, or, you know,

the end of life and the beginning of the afterlife. Nothing is real, really, with the Gothic. So I like that. I like that contradiction that it contains.

And it's funny because both of your answers almost reflect how I feel about. About it, because I think it's almost a Merging of both your two answers. You know, the idea of the landscape, the setting, almost being this third character.

In the same way, that psychological aspect, again, is. Is almost like a real presence, a real figure.

And all of these.

These things, like you were just referencing there, Andrea, that it subverts the known. It turns everything on its head. Everything feels familiar, but yet unfamiliar.

And it's this disobedience to what we kind of know and expect and the. The ideas of what things should be like.

And so for me, it's this perfect marriage of both of your answers and. And I think that's why it's a really marvelous lens through which to explore the accounts and the history and the folklore that you do.

Because it's beautiful, it's unsettling. It's so many things mixed up into that.

And it just allows you to really, truly get to the heart of some of, like you said, these collective anxieties, these cultural traumas, these forgotten or silenced moments of history.

It really allows us to understand and explore history through the lens of these types of stories and to get a much deeper,

nuanced, balanced approach and reflection on some of what's happened in the past that I think we can still learn so strongly from today.

Thank you. I agree that one of the things that I love that Andrea, is lifting up is this kind of the flexibility of the gothic. And also that has frustrated people through time.

The Gothic novels have not very.

Have often been quite sort of looked down upon in sort of literary spheres through the years. Very often they're thought of as, like, tawdry.

And I think, you know, that you're in a beleaguered genre when Jane Austen is trolling you. I mean, she's trolling the Gothic novel with Northanger Abbey. That's the whole point of that book.

And so there is this. There is this tendency to sort of think that Gothic is like, oh, it's just all emotions and it's all melodrama. Well, it allows us, with that psychological focus.

It's the malleability, the flexibility of it is why it does become so personal and why everyone has their own personal take about what the gothic is. Because it really is relying on the reader to have their own emotional experience,

which is highly personal. And no one's gonna have the same emotional ride through this deeply psychological narrative, which is asking you, the reader, to put yourself into these situations and see how you do.

It's so unfair for people to be dismissive of this genre and that probably,

you know,

I'm not going to Change anybody's mind here. I know I'm probably speaking to people who already agree with me, but for maybe someone who's just coming at this with a frame of reference of like, oh, those,

those dime store novels like the ones the drugstore sells, you know, with the bosomi woman on the front in her negligee, fleeing the castle.

So yes, this is a deeply political and subversive text.

And I, I think that it's so silly to,

to dismiss the gothic. And I don't even think Jane Austen was just trolling the gothic. I think she was making some really subtle critiques about like, judgments on people's readership, habits and preferences.

But like, my ultimate case in point is going to be, it's going to be an American example, because that's where I'm speaking from right now.

Even though I grew up in Canada, I live in the United States now.

And the things that this country has done with the gothic genre I think fundamentally disproves this accusation of it being a frivolous genre. And I'm just gonna throw down Beloved by Toni Morrison and kind of leave it there.

So the other thing that I thought was really,

the other thing I thought was great about the book we wrot was as I was writing it, you know, we had written about ghosts before and that's a very straightforward concept,

but this was a really tangled concept. It was very weird. As I was writing it, I was like,

fun with gothic tropes, ghost stories with gothic tropes. What are we doing? The gothic is a literary genre. How are we supposed to apply the tropes of a fictional genre to.

I'm going to put quotes around this.

True or real ghost stories. So the ghost stories we talk about in the book are real ghost stories that have worked their way into American ghost lore and folklore. They're real histories.

They're stories people have told as real, essentially.

So nonfictional stuff is what I'm saying. And we're going to apply a fictional framework to these non fictional tales of folklore. And I'm like, that's a really weird idea.

And then as I was writing it, I was like, huh,

this is actually kind of brilliant. Because one thing that sort of became apparent to me as I was doing all the work was like, oh, the way that we actually tell ourselves ghost stories is really deeply informed by the media that we consume.

And that includes gothic literature. Whether it's like literally sitting down and reading gothic literature or reading the books that have grown out of that genre later and are more modern and especially horror literature,

or whether we're watching movies or television shows that are inspired by it.

So all these Gothic tropes, this stock of Gothic tropes, we're all aware of it as a society. Even if we're not sitting down and reading the. The canonical literature, we're aware of these tropes and we utilize and we employ these tropes when we tell ghost stories.

They help us to fill in the blanks.

And I can't tell you how many ghost tours I've gone on where I've heard things that I'm like, that's literally like from Jane Eyre, you know, and someone just put that on their ghost tour.

That's how we tell ourselves these stories.

So, you know,

then. Then, like my head exploded and now I'm just. I don't. I don't even know. Like, it just broke me. It broke my brain. And it was wonderful. It was.

It was amazing.

And I was just going to say that, you know,

I don't know how you managed to do it because it's.

It seems like such a different sidestep from what you did before. But the more I read it like you, I think the more it made sense because it just allow.

It becomes this vehicle, doesn't it, that we all understand.

Whether we've been absorbed in this type of material or not, it's still something that we understand culturally.

And it just became this vehicle to help understand these accounts and a means through which we can look at them and explore them in a way that feels familiar as well.

And so it kind of made sense. As you said,

it didn't feel like it was going to be the next step that you took after Invisible Women, but actually it's such an interesting sidestep to marry these two things together because the worlds are so,

so linked.

And it's a conversation that I was only having recently with a different author who was writing about spiritualism and the rise of spiritualism and setting her story, you know, this gothic novel within that kind of setting.

But these worlds are so entangled, and like you said,

one almost feeds the other. You know, there is this relationship between the two of them that I think went hand in hand.

You know, penny dreadfuls, materials being published all the time that echoed these stories that people had that people were talking about and sharing, and it just fueled the genre. And so it's a brilliant,

brilliant kind of vehicle through which to explore some truly fascinating cases and examples.

And I just don't know how you managed to select and pick the pieces that you did, because I bet you were spoiled for choice in terms of which ones you were going to focus on.

I don't know how you managed to narrow it down because they're all so fascinating and there's so many brilliant accounts out there.

It's like Sophie's Choice, isn't it? Which one to choose and which one to write about and to explore.

I will go to my grave thinking about the stories we didn't get to.

Yeah.

Yes. I have to.

I kind of just consider the process of the choice of the stories as a bit of spiritualism in action, where I'm just kind of letting the spirit world tell me what they really, really want me to do.

And then I kind of absolve myself of other things that didn't make it in the book this time. I mean, I'm gonna. I'm gonna be writing about these kinds of things one way or another until I myself become a ghost.

So,

you know, so there will be time for all things,

but.

But maybe not every ghost story. I don't, you know, that we are. We are in fact spoiled for choice. So I really just did kind of.

We.

We both.

I believe in both books really kind of had a process of what are the ones that are calling to us? What are the ones that really. We are eight. That are really getting at us, that are really getting under our skin, the things that haunt us the.

The most.

And. And it. It sorted out very organically, just like it did with the first one. It sorted out very organically into.

These are the things that are calling to me. These are the things that are calling to you. Fantastic. And we didn't necessarily coordinate that each one of us was going to address some of the others.

Deep fears, but it just sort of.

It just sort of worked out that way that I. I was fine writing about underground claustrophobic spaces, and that's one of the things that Andrew didn't want to. Didn't. That was like.

Oh, that's a.

That's a touchstone there.

It's kind of, in a way, a little bit selfish the way that we organize the book because so many of our personal obsessions are being, you know,

like, metabolized, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we're.

It's.

It's not perfect.

I think that we. We definitely focus on the things that haunt us, like Leanna said. And I don't know, is that to the detriment of the reader because it's not a comprehensive survey, or does it serve the reader because we're going to write more passionately, passionately about the things that we do focus on.

I don't know. Like I said, I'm going to go to my grave being tortured by this.

The one kind of glimmer of hope. See, I don't absolve myself, right? So the one glimmer of hope that I have is that for all the failures and gaps that we have in this project,

other people are filling those in. Like, I really wanted to write something about California because I do have a background in film studies, and I really wanted to do, like, California Gothic.

And,

you know, I think there's also a pragmatic element to our choices.

We have a limited number of days in the month and hours in each day. And I think that the material circumstances of the production of a book in the year 2025 need to be considered by the audience.

And I'm not saying that as an excuse,

but, you know, we are working in a system that is very squeezed for resources right now.

And in nonfiction especially,

it shows.

It shows. And this is not just our book, but it's all books right now.

Authors don't have enough time and money and resources to do the work they need to do because we are scrambling and living on the fringes of solvency and forced to work day jobs.

So we don't. We can't. We're not David grand, and the New Yorker's not giving us hundreds of thousands of dollars to go and do this.

So we're working on a shoestring budget with extremely limited time and resources. Did I want to go to California and write a chapter about the California Gothic? Hell, yeah. Could I?

I couldn't.

That being said,

very soon after I turned in my. My pages, I discovered a book called California Gothic.

And that made me really happy. I was like, okay, someone else has done this project.

And so the glimmer of kind of hope that I have is that our book works in conversation and in concert with other existing books. So we don't have to be, like, comprehensive.

We're not the only book out there. So there's a book called California Gothic. There's a great book by a British.

Or.

Is she Irish? She's from the uk.

An author?

Yeah, she's Irish. She's from Cork. Her name is Miranda Corcoran, who this, this year published with repeater books,

Haunted States, an American Gothic guidebook.

And it's fantastic. So, you know, there are. There are other works out there that can go on your shelf next to ours, and that alleviates some of the pressure I think of.

Of us having to do all.

Every state, every story, you know,

but, yeah, it's tough. It's tough.

I don't know how you would be able to do that. I mean, this book alone is. Is. Is a lengthy book.

And, you know, the. It would be impossible to cover everything, to put everything in there.

But I think, like you said, you. You cover enough that for the person reading it, they're going to have accounts and.

And kind of those unsettling anxieties that really leap out at them that again, are those interests that they've maybe explored before and read before or talked about before or watched on film or something before that feels familiar.

And they're able to explore those kind of passions, those areas that interest them or intrigue them or unsettle them.

But at the same time, there are new things.

And I think the fact that you get a little bit of so many of these different areas, like you said, is this almost launching off point to other novelists, other writers, other researchers, other folklorists.

You know, it gives you the opportunity to then go away and like you said, start having this wider conversation about the Gothic genre. And of course,

these wonderful accounts that we have that allows us to explore some of those same themes, how they express some of the things that we see in them. I mean,

it opens up all those different avenues, doesn't it? For which then it's a personal path for the reader themselves to go on, which I think is great.

I think that's actually a brilliant approach.

I hope so.

I was grateful that Kensington at no point told us that anything had to be a comprehensive state by state.

At no point that it was that. That was never the trajectory either for A Haunted History of Invisible Women or for America's Most Gothic. It was.

What are.

What are the stories that are truly bubbling up to the surface for you? And what.

What we did have to sometimes make a choice of. Of difference. We just. We had to make sure some of the tropes were being included. And so we had to sometimes make sure that we were trying to offer a wide range of things from that applied to the different Gothic tropes.

So that's the structure of this book, similarly to how we structured A Haunted History of Invisible Women with the tropes and the stereotypes that often women are sort of filed into in America's most Gothic.

We're organizing the book in terms of the tropes of Gothic literature and sort of trying to take you on a journey that would roughly follow a certain amount of a Gothic Novels beat structure as best as possible,

with each one of these chapters hopefully being stories within stories. You don't. You don't have to necessarily read our book chronologically. It's been interesting to hear from different readers who talk about reading it straight through or only being able to do a little bit at a time because some of the subject matter is heavy with this.

And so there is. However people come to it, we hope that there's just a buffet of things to consider.

And again, I think the fact that you have that space to really cover those accounts, those stories in the way that you do means that it's not just a kind of surface level approach to telling that account.

You really do tell them thoroughly and really don't over kind of overrate the pudding in the sense that you're not sensationalising them. You're doing a really thorough account of them in a way that I think for many people, they will appreciate because it does give that much deeper understanding.

And again, I think that's because you haven't had to do everything.

You haven't had to write about every type of trope and cover all these stories from across all of America.

It's allowed you to do the stories and the accounts that you have really, really well,

thoroughly. And I appreciate that as someone who finds exploring these types of accounts and stories so fascinating because of the history and the psychological thoughts and anxieties, you know what it helps us to understand.

I appreciate it for that because I think they are so important to be told well so that we can really learn from them.

And again, I think that's. Like I was saying,

you can do that when you have the space to do it, rather than feeling like you can only spend so many words on them because you've got to fit in everything.

That would just. I think it would do a disservice to what you're trying to achieve here. So again, I think it's brilliant that you've had that space and that freedom to explore these accounts the way that you have.

Yeah, the last thing I wanted to write was a sort of encyclopedia. You know what I mean? That sounds boring to write and boring to read and not even useful in this age that we live in, you know, that's so.

I was also grateful that we were never forced to do like a comprehensive reference encyclopedia or like a best of or something that would feel like a printed out blog post, you know, I was really grateful we didn't have to do that.

And there were books out there. Yeah, there are books out There that cover like, you know, here's a. Here's a rundown of the greatest hits of X area locally.

And those books are great and those are often. And many of those books are part of our source materials where you know, there's these.

A compilation of accounts of a local area. I love those especially the. The. The more like self published that lives in the historical society kind of of book, the better.

But. But we though those very often only have these little nuggets and they don't do the deep dives of. Okay. Asking the why of the haunting.

That is what we are really trying to do is asking the why of the haunting and why the persistence and how does its relationship to gothic literature and these tropes that are familiar.

It adds to its staying power for sure. So the things that can be in dialogue with the pre existing tropes becomes this ongoing chicken and egg situation of what came first, the storytelling structure or the haunting itself.

Oh yeah, I love a good local guidebook. Don't get me wrong,

you know, but this is. This is hopefully more than that or something. Not more than that sounds mean. This is hopefully something that's different from that. A good local guidebook is a beautiful thing.

And yeah, you're. You're a local historian.

Without local historians,

this book would not have been possible. So there was a man named Stephen Walker. There is a man named Stephen Walker. He's still alive and well in St. Louis. Steven Walker in St.

Louis was a resource for my Lemp family chapter and he is exactly that kind of treasure, national treasure. Who writes the best haunted guidebooks? There's someone that are local to the area that have done the research that have gone through the old newspapers that are on the location.

They have a collection of photographs, probably of memorabilia too.

These people in the books they write are a gift and I love them deeply.

So this is not to say, oh, I didn't want to write a book like that. What I didn't want to write was a book that was using that as a primary source and synthesizing that as a watered down secondary source.

So someone like Stephen Walker to me was again just a national treasure. And to keep people like that sort of at the foremost of the forefront of my mind when I'm.

I'm thanking people and acknowledging people like these are the people doing the work in, in their hometowns. And I love them. I love them deeply. Every single person who was a resource for me locally in their communities.

You know, this book wouldn't exist without them.

It.

It wouldn't be the same at all.

And just kind of following on from that because actually I was going to ask you how you approach the research kind of involved for this, because again,

it's no easy feat to pull together something that you have and as comprehensively as you have.

How did you go about that process for both of you? Where were you looking?

What were your starting points? How did it kind of evolve as the writing continued?

Well, this is one of my favorite questions. I love this one. Leanna, do you wanna start? Cause I'm about to take a big old sip of water here.

I, I, I cheated a little bit in that. I, I did several things that really happened to me. So I, I, I knew that there were things that had actually happened to me over the course of my life because I've lived a very gothic life in terms of, I've tried to live my life like a Gothic novel.

Not, not with any of the really tawdry stuff,

but,

but just in terms of the things I am drawn to.

You know, I've sought out haunted places in which to work. I have sought out certain narratives to go on deep dives about.

I have gone to the various haunted locations and done the thing that's supposed to summon the ghost. And every now and then it's worked.

So there's definitely been,

for me, a certain amount of, okay, well, what, what is my own lived experience that I can put into this book?

That was not everything there. There were certainly other things that I very specifically came to just for this book.

And usually it was the things that horrified me the most that ended up getting into the book.

But my starting point was some of my own experiences. And then the other things were from that point was looking through, just pouring over, just grabbing a book out of a stack of books, grabbing a book and looking through and seeing what Gothic tropes came through to the surface for me and then going,

okay, I like that. That's, that's got something interesting to it. Oh, my goodness. There's a, there's a tunnel called the ****** pit.

Are you kidding me? Because we had, early on knew that if we're writing a book about American,

America's most gothic, then everything has to start with an Edgar Allan Poe quote. So I was like, literally, there's a, there's a,

a spectral accounting of the ****** Pit that sounds straight out of an Edgar Allan Poe story. So that's going in the book.

And then I tried to find it, and that was also terrifying.

So I definitely feel like, for me, there was what Can I put myself.

What?

Can I literally put myself as the gothic heroine in peril as I'm trying to get my feet on the ground in as many of these places as humanly possible? That was not the.

I was not able to do that for everything.

But the more personal experience for me, the better because of that relationality to the reader.

That's not cheating. That's valid and it's also important. It's how history is written. It's. It's prime. It's the most primary source in the world.

I think that's intensely valid and wonderful.

For me, it was kind of the same. You know, I have a large stock in store of ghost stories, right? I've Learned over the 10 plus years I've been a tour guide.

So, like, I just have these things kind of at my fingertips. And then for places that I wasn't familiar with, I just, I just called people up who I knew,

who are like, I know you're into this kind of stuff. I know you have ghost stories. Can you give me any that, like, have a gothic element to them? And I just conducted a bunch of interviews with people in different locations.

And, you know, some of them didn't, like,

there's this wonderful writer in Detroit who has written a book called Mysterious Michigan and had some, like, wonderful stories about Detroit that were so cool. And. And as we spoke, she was like, I just don't think any of these are gothic.

Like, I just don't think it fits the criteria. So I had to kind of shelve that one and then move on to another place. So in case you're like, why are there no stories about the Midwest in Andrea's, you know, work?

I just, I didn't find any.

Anyone who, like, told me a good one,

so. Which is, again, totally unfair. And I know they're out there, but I had to use kind of my own personal network.

Also, for what it's worth, people can be sensitive to, like, how their hometowns are perceived too. Again, going back to the question of Detroit, Detroit has a big problem with ruin ****, right?

So if I'm like, I want to talk about gothic ruins, they're like, please don't talk about Detroit. Like, we have a problem with that and we don't want to. To talk about that.

So, like, kind of have to respect people's boundaries and desires too.

So.

But for me, mostly I just took like, all the stories that I knew, all the ghost stories I'd ever heard or been told that seemed like they had a gothic element to Them and explored.

Explored them further and ended up just, like, following little trails as far as I could, trying to use as many kind of firsthand, firsthand accounts as I could, trying to visit as many places as I could.

And again, it's just like Leanna said earlier, like, we have to find things that speak to us, that motivate us to write passionately about a subject.

And a lot of our pet and personal kind of obsessions are in here.

So, you know, I followed those as well.

Um,

yeah, so my favorite stories are ones that, like, contain an element that just, you know, kind of grabbed me and wouldn't let me go that I. I just couldn't stop thinking about.

And I think it comes back to a word that was. Was said earlier, which is, this is a bit of a buffet, isn't it? Because it just means that you can go in and you can dip your toe in and.

And pick it up wherever you want and start reading wherever you want.

And,

you know, it just covers those.

Those wide variety of passions and, you know, from the perspective of the reader.

I did precisely that. I did not start at the beginning. I went to my favorite section that I. I talk about all the time on. On my own podcast because it's just such a fascinating subject matter for me and always has been.

And. And so I started there and then just danced around the book, looking at really intriguing aspects that I find personally fascinating, intriguing that I knew about, that I didn't know about, that kind of fell into that same kind of genre and area,

and then just chose where I wanted to go. So it became this very personal experience of reading the book.

And that's something I don't really typically do normally. I am very,

very methodical. I read the book from the beginning to the end, and I. And I don't deviate from that path. But this just felt like the perfect book to which there are no rules, there's no ways to approach it.

And so, yeah, it very much was like that wonderful buffet where you just keep going back for more and more and more and experiencing different chapters. And then, yeah, it's a totally different experience, which is great.

Well, thank you. And now I'm curious. Where did you start?

Where do you think?

See, we're laughing here, because for our readers, for our listeners here,

Michelle did a really great job with alerting me to a story that I then had to write about, which was Elena and the Count and the story of Carl Tanzler that I learned about from this podcast.

So,

so, so, so thank you for that. And also,

I have to say, that's one that would not let me sleep at night. I actually.

When I was writing the Elaine on the Count chapter, I actually. I could not sleep for about a week.

And because I was so upset about it, I was so mad about it.

And so I actually had to write a piece of fiction where I had this Germanic deity come and collect this man because he faced no consequences in life. And I was just so angry about it that I had to fictionalize something to, like, allow myself to have a little bit of closure of something that got.

Got. Really.

Really got me. So that. That one's in the open crypt. Part of the book, everyone.

And that would be my favorite section because it covers,

I mean, my interests.

I mean, it's just a morbid fascination for many. I'm sure they would think that. But for me,

it's beyond that, I think,

to kind of look at some of these anxieties around burial and the body and death and what happens after death is such a fascinating moment in history for me to explore.

And you cover some of the really, truly interesting accounts that really look at that from so many different angles.

And again, they are touching points and talking points,

whether it is, you know,

the vampire kind of panic that swept so many parts of the world with regards to Mercy Brown's exhumation that you treat, and, of course, Elena and the Count, which has that kind of macabre devotion to the body after death, and the idea of being able to bring somebody back from the dead,

you know, all of those are just so intriguing to me.

And, yeah, that's where I just had to go first, because I've. I've had the privilege of being able to. To speak to so many incredible people, whether they are microbiologists, whether they are folklorists, whether they are historians,

being able to explore those.

Those topics through their eyes. But then here, being able to do it, you know, through the book was just another brilliant way for which I could dive into a subject matter that, for me, is rather intriguing for what it enables us to understand.

And you're right, they are unsettling.

They are deeply unsettling in some cases, but they're also very revealing in terms of what they offer up and the understanding that I think you get from them. So that was my starting point.

In fact, I think I reread that section about 10 times because I just loved it so much. I found myself. Kept going back to it.

It's so funny that you mentioned, like, the corporeality, like, the actual physical Material facts of burial and of decomposition and of death. Like, I am so.

I think I am so metaphorical. Like, I'm so in my own head all the time. Like, when I think of these narratives of premature burial or, like, entrapment and suffocation, I'm always like,

it's a metaphor for how women are suffocated in life.

And. And then when I stop and think about it, I mean, it is a metaphor for how women are suffocated in life, but it's also, you know, woman is house, woman is entrapped, whatever.

But,

you know, the. The physicality of it is something that, when I stop and think about it, and I am a professional, spooky person,

horrifies me. And I spend a lot of time in cemeteries, as people like us tend to do,

but I. I dislike the.

The knowledge of decomposition. You know what I mean? Like, the idea of actual rot is grotesque to me, and I'm very superstitious about the terroir of cemeteries. So, like, I live near Greenwood, which is a big cemetery in Brooklyn.

And they do fun things. Like, they have honeybees, and they, like. Well, you know, there's apples growing on trees there, and. And people, like,

grab an apple off a tree and munch it, and I'm like, I'm not eating a cemetery apple. That. That horrifies me.

Don't even, like, filling my water bottle at the fountain there. Which is stupid. But, like, it's just the actual thought of all that decay,

it's such a simple and obvious thing,

and. And it doesn't seem scary. It seems almost childish, but, like, it's really gross and horrifying, and I hate it. And, you know, I want to be cremated. I don't want to rot.

Like, it's just. It's horrifying.

So. Yeah, and it's funny, too. The. The Carl Tanzler story. That's something I've come across just, you know, because. Because of what I do. I. I knew that story.

And it makes me laugh that.

That Leanna, you were so upset by it, because I have written short stories about lovers reanimating corpses out of love.

Um, and I'm like, oh, yeah, I. I think about this stuff. I write about this. I'm totally comfortable with it. It's really funny.

No, but see, but that's the difference.

See, they see. But you.

You hit upon the exact difference. You hit upon the why.

The why.

The why. Elena and the Count. This story upsets me so much. So if. If these are lovers, truly lovers, Consensual lovers who loved one another.

By all means. By all means, Corpse Bride, that stuff. By all means, please do. If it is consensual, if it is a relationship, if it is actual love,

what.

What Tanzler did is possession of someone that was never in a relationship with him in defiance of respect of the family's wishes.

That is what. Because then it became about possession, and then it became this domineering figure who was literally creating a revisionist history about this Cuban woman and then making her into this Germanic figure in his head.

And so it's just. It's problematic on every level. I am all. I mean, I am all about the. The romance of things,

but this, to me, is. Is one of those clarifications of. No, no, no, y'.

All.

Wuthering Heights is not a romance. It's a cautionary tale. So is this one.

It's funny, too, because it's like, neither you nor I, Liene, like, seem focused on the corporeal nature of this, like, the way Michelle seems to be. But, like, we are both looking at the metaphor.

So,

um, you know,

when. And this isn't one of my pet metaphors. So it's. It's. I'm just noticing this now as you're speaking about it.

When I wrote my story, by the way, it was totally non consensual, and it was like the same thing, but for me, it was like, la, la, la. This is fun and spooky and weird, but I think, like, you know, for you, I think you see the horror in it because you are very much more a public figure than I am,

and you have an intense and intimate knowledge of what it feels like when somebody presumes to have some sort of. Some sort of ownership over you. When somebody presumes to say, oh, I'm going to.

You know, I'm going to stalk this person. I'm going to act like I own this person. And I think authors get this a lot. Like, you are expected to be available to your audience.

You are expected to be a willing listener to them, and you are expected to be available to them at all times, in all ways, in very intimate ways. You invite a camera into your home to do an unboxing video, and it's very personal and intimate, and this is your space.

And,

you know, so just that. That, yes, it's problematic because. Colonialism, I hear that. But it's also problematic because of this presumption of ownership over someone you don't even know.

And that's really repellent And I think that's what's hitting your. Your buttons is. Is just,

you know, because I'm. I'm not as. I'm not as well known as you, and.

And I think that that's something that. That bugs you.

At the risk of, like, presumptuously psychoanalyzing you.

No, that's. That's valid and very real.

And I have had experiences that are. Are harrowing in those regards. Absolutely. And so I. I do think, like, well, yeah, read our book, and you will see our issues.

So, like, I think you can extend that out to every woman. Everywhere has been. It is presumed that she is available.

She is available emotionally, physically,

is sexually. However,

even just walking down the street. It's her job to smile at you. You know what I mean? Like, so I think, even though we might not understand it to that extent, I think on some level, we all understand that presumption of our availability,

no matter what we actually want. So, you know, that's. That's the gothic for you.

But I think it's brilliant that you.

You do give that element of almost reclaiming her part in the story, because,

sadly, oftentimes the telling of the account of Elena and the Count, you know, she's overlooked her part in the story, is sadly, kind of almost obliterated.

And the tragedy of what happened to her far went beyond what the Count did. You know,

when her remains were found, she had to be buried in secret so that people wouldn't go looking for her, because it was almost as if she'd been possessed by the community and by all these onlookers wanting this kind of moment of attachment to her because of this strange account that had made the newspapers and so on.

And so it's a brilliant opportunity and one that I think you do so well to tell that story where she is as much the center of this and what happened to her is there on every page,

so that, again, you get the full story, not this sensationalized,

grotesque,

you know, macabre story. It's a very authentic account of what happened where you do see all the sides. And I think that's what makes it so compelling when you read something like that in the.

You know, in depth, as it goes. Because,

as I said, so oftentimes what happened to Elena and Elena herself is pretty much unknown in the accounts that are shared publicly. And I think that's to the detriment of the actual people, their experiences and what happened.

So, yeah, it's a big well done. I loved it. And like I said, I Kept going back into it time and time again. That whole section, all of your writings for that chapter I just found absolutely brilliant.

And it also kind of makes me think of Mercy Brown and some of the other Rhode island vampires the way they are. You know, their graves have to be hidden or removed or guarded because of the way the public just decides to have their way with them, you know.

Absolutely.

You know, the fact that they've come a different type of ghost story,

a different type of something that's owned by the community and the family as well, by the way, because, you know, they very much fell into that trappings of guarding the grave and perpetuate, perpetuating some of the stories around,

around the ghost of Mercy Brown type thing, you know, it does. It becomes something that's owned by everybody, doesn't it? Which,

yeah, is, is interesting when you start to kind of tease that apart.

Well, I think also with the Lemp family too, I think I got a little highbrow started quoting like Ted Hughes or something. But you know, nobody owns the facts of their own lives, right?

So this idea of public ownership of a private story is something that I really thought was fascinating. Writing the, the Lemp chapter and many stories in the book. Ghost Stor.

You know, how we, how we treat. What are these private, intimate stories like with Hattie Martindale, you know, her great grand nephew is strenuously trying to clear her name and be like, no, she wasn't this like spooky mad woman.

And, and it's like, well, who owns her story? Who owns the story of the lamps? Who owns any ghost story? You know, like, if you tell somebody a ghost story,

are they stealing it? You know, when they retell it, like, who do ghosts belong to?

That's, that's kind of this, this question.

And who,

who advocates for the dead who cannot defend themselves or speak for themselves?

I think that's so. Well, I think that's very well put. I think you're absolutely right. And, and again, I think it's one of the.

I think it's the compelling aspect of this, isn't it?

And again, it makes it very personal because I think people have their own ghost stories that they have that, you know, versions of these that are so personal to them and maybe their family or their local community.

And so I think sometimes cracking that open a little bit and exploring the levels and the layers of these stories is again, it's a fascinating journey, I think, to be able to have a conversation around them then and to again, just take that bit of a deeper Dive to understand where some things came from or how some things came to be or maybe how it moved away from,

you know, this version and you know, again, to see how it's been reshaped time and time again by again the moving kind of traumas and experiences that change over history.

To see how that shaped these tales again,

making them personal and different as they've evolved.

Again, I think it's just a fascinating aspect of these types of stories that they resonate with people differently and at different timeframes because of the experiences that they're having or where they live or, you know, what's surrounding them and what they're experiencing on a day to day.

Yeah, and ghost stories are in a constant act of creation. Like they're not static,

they're oral traditions. They're told and retold, they're reinterpreted, like you said,

depending on the teller and on the era. They have different meanings, different intentions.

And, and they're,

they're always in flux, they're always moving. And so they're. Because they're so hard to pin down.

They are really gothic in that sense because of their malleability, because of how complex they are, because,

you know,

the, the way they're always changing undermines the notion of like a fixed or static truth or a,

a definitive history.

You know, it's. It changes with the teller. And so that I think is something ghost stories and the gothic have in common is, is just that slippery,

always dynamic nature and, and there is no fixed reality kind of.

Well, we hope that through line of, of this book and that readers of our first book, if you enjoyed A Haunted History of Invisible Women,

one of the through lines I think that we've stayed true to is trying to get to the heart of the people behind the ghost lore as best we know how,

as best as possible. Now we're still coming in with. Going to be our own.

Our own angles or takes on the story. You know, we still have our own.

It's. It's impossible to be completely objective in any of these kinds of situations. Writing about any of this sort of lore,

we are going to inevitably come in with some of our own assumptions.

But trying to rehumanize the people at the heart of narratives that have very often gotten away from them out of their own control,

that's going to be something that you're going to find as a through line between both of the books is that trying to sort of say, who are these people behind all of these trappings?

As best we can discover and ask questions of who these people are, because we don't have all the answers. But we are asking for the readership to think critically about any of these spaces.

And when you go into them,

understanding that it's, it is more than just a scary story.

Yeah. And it's also something that is impossible to prove. I like that essence of impossibility. Like, the ghost sometimes is not a real story and it's not a real person.

It's a metaphor. It's a cipher. It's not one person. It's a collective group of people.

So like Audra, the ghost bride of the Grand Galvez Hotel in Texas. You know, she's not a real person,

but she stands in for something real.

Miranda in Melrose hall, as far as I know, not a real person or based on a real person, but stands in for somebody who lived at that time.

So a lot of these people,

you know, it's, it's always difficult for somebody to research really hard and work really hard and try and get to the heart of the real person behind this story and then just be like, there is no real person behind this story.

This is a made up story. But the lovely thing about ghost lore is, like, it doesn't have to be real to be true.

So, you know, this is, this is a kind of person that we're talking about. And who does this person mean to us?

And why are, why are we talking about this person?

What, what does the ghost want us to do for them? And what do we want the ghost to do for us? And that's not an original thought. That comes from a woman named Koya Paz.

She has a TED talk. You can look it up. And she says we're often asking, like, what do we want from the ghost? You know,

so it's, it's that kind of interrelationship between what we desire and what we need and how we're processing things.

So,

like, it sounds funny to say this, but, like, ghosts aren't real. Most of the time they're not real. And you shouldn't expect them to be real.

Sometimes they are,

sometimes they're not. If you can accept that ambiguity, you're in a good place to start.

And I, I, I think you both said something so absolutely true. And it's that it, it's just the, the moment, the pause that the book gives you to be able to explore the humanity behind the hauntings.

And I think that makes it much more real.

And it just allows that moment to honor, like you said, what it is that these accounts have to say whether that person is a real person or like you said, a stand in for someone else.

And I think when you lose that sensationalism that often gets attached to these types of stories and accounts,

when you're able to see the humanity behind the hauntings, and it just makes that creep factor, that psychological factor,

you know, the. The idea of the setting and all of those things that were touched upon right at the very beginning,

again, it makes all of those more real because we can relate to it. We can see something that we recognize in it.

And I think when we start to see it as something true, that we recognize that we understand a person. That is the.

The creep factor is just magnified times 100, isn't it? And again,

that's something that then keeps us coming back to it because it has that ability to do that.

But I think when it honors the humanity, when it honors the human beings, the people for whom this helps us to understand,

gosh, does that make that even more powerful and something that just resonates even more for me personally,

because.

The person spoiler is usually. I think there's nothing more arrogant than someone who tries to debunk a ghost story. It's the most fruitless, pointless, arrogant endeavor.

And I hope to never,

ever be perceived as trying to do that. I'm not out to debunk anything.

We do want to clarify the things that have been, like, falsified, but at the same time.

But the act of trying to create the ghost story, it always comes from somewhere, and there's always a reason why,

and there's always a function of it one way or another.

And so that, you know, when I. When I talk, I give talks all around the country about the importance of ghost stories, and it's because they are us grappling with our own mortality.

And there's nothing more personal than that. In the realm of the quote, unquote paranormal. This is the most real thing you can get, is us grappling with our.

Fear of death and just to kind of circle back to something we touched on very, very briefly earlier. I mean,

in terms of.

Andrea, we all now know you don't like claustrophobic spaces underground.

I'm kind of with you on that one, I'll be honest.

Yeah, I don't like small spaces.

I assume you are.

But just kind of thinking about that and kind of diving into that a little bit further. I don't know if there were particular stories or figures or chapters that you just found either really moving to be able to share or difficult to share and to confront.

I mean, I don't know if you want to kind of elaborate on what that experience was. Was like for you both personally, in terms of the. The things that were hard to talk about and write about or the.

The things that were just something you felt really compelled and the why you were compelled to write about them.

The one that I had, though, I think one of the hardest times with.

Because of the enormity of the place,

is Mary Virginia Wade of Gettysburg.

She's the one civilian casualty in the Gettysburg conflict of the Civil War.

And that place,

my God, that town, that little town that was caught in the crossfire of an accidental meeting of Confederate troops and Union troops and a battle that played out in the streets with civilians mostly taking shelter in basements, except for Mary Virginia Wade, who felt compelled to bake bread for Union soldiers.

And it sounds almost like a parable from some sort of holy book that this woman felt compelled to bake bread for her brethren.

And that is when she was shot by a stray bullet that came through two doors to lodge straight up into her heart,

killing her instantly.

And she.

She being sort of a focal point upon which to contextualize the Gettysburg conflict, which was enormous. And I didn't really understand just how pivotal it was in American history until I was there and realized how close Gettysburg was.

It was.

It was the defining battle of what our history was going to look like from that point on.

Um, we'd be living in a completely different timeline had Gettysburg gone differently.

And so that I. I've never been in a place where I'm realizing that history is living in the present moment because that town is constantly reliving that war. Part of that is because there's reenactments happening all the time.

Part of that is because most of the town is, in fact, a national monument.

And because the residual hauntings there are so intense and.

And.

And there's incredible guides that work there. My goodness. The test you have to pass to be able to become a Gettysburg tour guide. My goodness.

College examinations have nothing on that test.

It is incredible.

And I have such respect for everyone who. Who is in that place trying to tell that history every day because I.

I got migraines just from the couple days I was there,

because the energy is just so intense there. And so I had a hard time encapsulating her story because it's the story of Gettysburg, too. And I don't know if I did a good job with it or not.

I just felt my way through it and hoped to God. At the end, I could just kind of honor her as best as possible because her story also got away from her, too.

So frustrating when your story gets away from you. I think that's just the great injustice to be rectified. And you did a great job with that, really, Leanna. And as you were speaking, I thought,

how intense must it be to live in Gettysburg and to relive trauma every day?

Surreal life. Those people mislead.

Yeah. I have a friend, Cedric Whitaker, who's a ghost tour guide there. He used to be a ghost tour guide in New Orleans. And he was like, new Orleans has nothing on Gettysburg.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that's saying something.

Yeah.

So for me, Michelle,

I'm gonna give you a really unsatisfactory answer.

The stuff that was the hardest for me to write about is also hard for me to talk about.

And because I don't want to burst into tears on your podcast, I will just say this.

If you read my chapters closely, it will become very obvious to you,

the hard stuff,

and you'll find it.

So.

Yeah.

And I would say that, you know, having read the book back to front, inside and out,

several times over now,

I think that comes through strongly with you.

I know exactly where you're referring. And I will kind of allow the future readers to kind of read that, because I think it's a journey and.

Yeah, I think you do. And I think this is where. This comes back to something that we said earlier and we were talking about earlier.

You can. You can see the passions in these chapters. You can see the.

The. The. The things that get under your skin for a whole variety of reasons, whether it's the.

The weight of the story and the.

The need to tell it,

as well as the things that are unsettling and difficult.

And I think it's amazing the fact that you do both put yourselves out there in the way that you do to tell these stories in the way that you do, because they become personal, don't they?

And they are your stories.

They are your words, they're your feelings and your anxieties.

And that's a very brave thing to do. I think, as an authority,

to put as much of it.

You know, as much of you into the book as you do and yet still deliver what are incredible accounts that just allow someone else to step in and understand them.

I mean, it's a hard thing. I think it must be very physically taxing,

and they're also very different. And the weight of getting it right and telling it,

I mean,

it's a very Brave thing to do. I don't know if I could.

I could do it as well.

So thank you.

But I feel like it's. When I was especially, I mean, just going back to Gettysburg, I was like, what is my discomfort compared to all of the people that suffered here?

What is my discomfort comparatively to those who were enslaved in a certain part of.

Of.

In. In a certain famous building that still exists in dc?

What.

What is. What is. What is our discomfort comparatively to some of these traumas that are. Are that we're talking about? So for me, it's sort of like the least I can do is be uncomfortable because, you know,

that is what history asks of us, is to be uncomfortable. Otherwise, you're not actually talking about real history.

Absolutely.

And I think, again, it just comes back to something that you said right at the very start.

You know, we live in a very unsettling time and to.

To deep. To dig deep into, you know, below the surface of these, we. We see the tragedy, we see the anxiety, we see the.

The collective trauma that can exhibit in a place, whether that's a building or a, you know, a wider community or a person.

And, you know, I think to explore them is to.

Is to dig up our own traumas, to dig up our own anxieties, to. To face it head on.

And that can be deeply unsettling. That can be,

you know, a conversation.

And,

you know, it's. It's something that we do need to do. You know, I think conversation is the starting point of so many things in a positive way.

And,

you know, I think that's certainly true today. I think we can learn so much by dialogue, by conversation, you know,

to kind of unpick what we see happening around the world. And here we have accounts that, like I said, are personal.

You put yourself into them that, you know, blood, sweat and tears have gone into writing these and researching these and sharing them with the passion and the integrity that you do.

To honor the stories, to honor the people behind them, is not easy.

And again, it's just this springboard, I think, to other dialogues and other conversations, because they do still represent problems and fears that persist in America and around the world today.

They are still just as real and important today. And I think that's.

That's the kind of the jump and the leap that I hope some people also take from reading the book, seeing things that still need discussing and kind of unpicking and teasing apart and evaluating and talking about,

because they're still relevant,

even though these are historical, you know, pieces of writing. About historical events.

These are still relevant today. We can still learn from them.

And it shouldn't have to be a radical act to tell the truth about history, but these days, it's becoming a radical act to tell the truth about history.

Yep. Well, first of all, thank you so much for saying those kind words, Michelle. I wish I could take you with me everywhere I go because, like, you are so kind.

In every single chapter I wrote, I tried to hold my hand out to the reader, you know, yes, these are personal. Yes, these are very much about my experiences. And the stories that I'm writing are very specific about these people's experiences.

But like you said so beautifully, Michelle, these are very universal fears and anxieties, especially now.

And I think the afterword that Liene wrote is so lovely because the Gothic is, you know, that haunted castle. We run from the castle, you know, we. We leave these places of horror behind us and we escape and we're free.

And so, yeah, there's terror and dread all around us, but, like, ultimately, the Gothic heroine triumphs, right?

Or.

Or hero,

the. The person who has suffered is somehow released. And I think, although this book deals with dread and darkness and horror and fear,

we are always holding out our hands to you in the dark. And we are all running from that castle together, and we're. We're all gonna make it. You know,

just read Liana's afterwards,

and I was.

Thank you.

I was going to say something very similar. It's. It's that moment, isn't it, where you see the power and the resilience that the Gothic genre offers, that, like you said, we're all running from the same scary place.

And there's something very hopeful and beautiful in that, as well as the dark aspects that obviously helps us to understand there is that. That hope, that resilience, that sense of triumph and power that we can take from that.

And,

you know,

speaking from, you know, very personal experience, I was reading this book after the passing of my nephew, who was taken far too young. I mean,

far too young. And it just hit me so hard for months and months and months.

And this was the hand kind of, I was holding onto, if you like, whilst I was kind of navigating some of that grief, because it did give me that sense of hope.

It did kind of remind me of some of those hopeful things that,

you know, we see. And it was just.

It was something necessary and very much needed. So, you know, personally, for me,

reading the. The book, it. It got me through some of that really dark stuff where I just Felt like there wasn't much hope and everything was a bit bleak. But here you do see those.

Those moments and those.

Those powerful aspects and that sense of resilience, which is very emboldening, I think. And again, something that. Something we sometimes need to lift us up from what we're dealing with right now and what we can feel sometimes day to day with the difficulties and the challenges that life sometimes throws at us.

Here is a reminder that things can be okay, too.

That, you know, we can.

We can escape and we can move away from those things that brighten us and pull us down and make us feel as if things are hopeless. They aren't.

So, yeah, it's a. It's a very personal book for me for that reason, as I say, it really did kind of help me navigate all of that.

That's so nice to hear. Thank you.

I'm so sorry for your loss. Yes. Oh, my goodness. But that's where we're.

We are all in conversation about this and we can be in community about this. That's the other thing too, that, that even though the Gothic thrives on a certain deprivation of agency as the core conflict, very often the Gothic,

when it tells you stories of isolation,

it's actually sort of its own warning to say, we can't. We can't do this alone.

We can't. That's. You're. You're going to be in danger if you're doing things alone. You really do need community. You really do need to be in dialogue with other people to find your way through.

And that's. And so I think the, the. The stories of isolation are.

Are very intentional in saying let's,

let's as a,

as a society,

as a world that is absolutely entwined,

let's try to, you know,

let's try to make sure that the, the light of our candelabra is lighting the path not just for us, but beyond.

Yeah,

gosh, more wonderful, powerful words there.

Because again, I think it's so absolutely true. I think it's that sense of community,

doesn't it? It reminds us of that and the necessity, like you said, to not be alone,

to not do things alone, that we aren't alone. And again, I think that's also part of the kind of what we see in these types of counts and exploration, because we, again, we see ourselves.

Don't we recognize ourselves and our own struggles? And it's that realization that actually we aren't alone in those struggles either and those anxieties that there is, again, something very connective in being able to explore folkloric tales or these real accounts,

to see the human.

The human aspect in it too,

which, again, just drives home some of those messages that we were just reflecting on.

It's a dizzying pendulum sometimes to think about how, yes, we need community and yes, we need each other. And then there's the things like the hysteria of the witch trials, where a certain amount of groupthink added to countless pointlessly murdered people.

And so there's this interesting thing about the world and society of like, yes,

we need everyone and we need to be in community, but just make sure that the group thing, think doesn't take away the idea of one's own individuality and their own rights within all of that.

And so that's kind of what the gothic asks us to do, is to sit with these very complicated,

very interconnected things and say, yes, we do need to be in community. We also have to make sure we respect everyone's autonomy within that as well. And so it is asking us to have both of these things in mind as we navigate.

And even though we don't talk about the witch trials as much in this book, they're the sort of reference,

definitely a lot of what Andrea is writing about in the Mercy Brown chapter and those related sort of panics where,

yes, where a whole community comes to. Not the correct conclusion about what to do about death.

Yeah, I was just gonna say the complexity of the gothic is the one thing I really took out of this project. And I have so much more respect for. For the gothic as a genre now than I did two years ago.

Sorry, just putting that out there.

Like, I. It completely opened my eyes to how much work this malign genre is actually doing.

Well, I think it also shows the. Like you said, the complexity of it. I think there's a.

For me, it brought this whole other level of appreciation because,

you know,

I think all three of us are probably huge fans of the gothic genre. And I've read multiple different versions and styles and authors and. And so on, but I think this just allowed me to appreciate it in such a different way and again, show the complexity and the diversity of it.

And yeah, that was just really enlightening for me. I. It was refreshing to kind of have this other kind of almost aha. Moment of seeing something that I love from a different perspective and viewing it in this way.

I mean, it was just really eye opening and I loved it for that reason. I hope there's more like this to come from both of you,

but I wouldn't be Surprised if you end up going down another route and doing something even more, you know, even just as wonderful in the future.

You're always surprising me with what you come up with next.

Again, I just want to clone you and carry you in my backpack everywhere I go.

Have your little sound bites. It's like, it's so affirming.

You're so nice.

Finally, just to kind of bring this together. Do you want to just let the readers know where they can find America's most gothic and so that they can go out and pick up their own copy to dive into and explore America's.

Most gothic haunted history? Stranger Than Fiction and will be available wherever books are sold. So please ask for it at your local,

your favorite local independent bookstore. We, we love a good brick and mortar local shop.

We, we love supporting the wonderful sort of community resources that those local bookstores are. Also ask for it at your local library as well, because libraries buy books and that really supports us too.

So wherever books are sold at your favorite retailers, it'll be available both in, in hardcover, it will be available digitally and there's an audiobook with Andrea and I reading our own chapter.

So we will actually tell you ghost stories with our own voices.

Oh, I'm definitely going to get that as well.

I think we all need some unsettling voices sharing the stories that we can listen and absorb in the car, don't we, when we just need to just switch off and just absorb ourselves in the words and the spoken word.

Um, I think you just appreciate it on a, on a different type of level, don't you, when than the, the words that you read off the page. So I'm going to have both pretty soon.

That will be on my bucket list of to something to sort out.

Honestly, it's been such a.

A privilege not only to be able to, to read the book,

but to be able to talk to you about it. Because truly it's one of the most intelligent, well crafted books that I've read.

Not just this year, but period red, period.

I just think it's so authentic and thoughtful and just gives you those moments to think, to pause, to critique,

to ask questions, to have conversations and yet also carry those other things that we've talked about, the fact that they,

they're unsettling the stories and yet somehow strangely beautiful as well that you can view them through different perspectives and different lens and see them for the complexity that they are and what they have to offer and to share.

So thank you so much for spending the time researching and bringing together such an incredible book for people to read,

but also for giving up your time in helping to share a little bit about the process and why you wrote the book,

where you got your inspiration and some of the touching points that we've talked about. I just really appreciate having the chance to be able to talk to you both.

Well, thank you so much.

You are the best and I'll say goodbye to everybody listening. Bye everybody.

Thank you for joining us on this journey into the unknown.

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