Encounters With the Invisible World: Being Ten Tales of Ghosts, Witches, and the Devil Himself in New England

by Marilynne K. Roach

Ghosts and witches are no strangers to New England - and the Devil, of course, is at home everywhere. In these lively tales, they go about their ancient business with characteristic Yankee aplomb. Old Berry Booker gives Skipper Perkins a surprising tour of his native Kittery, Maine, and earns herself a nice bit of halibut into the bargain. A gentle but persistent Vermont ghost makes his presence in the woodshed known to a bewildered family. Maria Hallett weaves a mysterious web while a ship is wrecked in a wild storm off Wellfleet. Sam Hart of Woburn wins a horse race - or does he? - and in New Hampshire General Moulton definitely strikes one bargain too many. Rafe Bright takes Jonathan Fayerweather along with him as he peddles broadsides and almanacs in the villages west of Boston, and Jonathan learns some lessons that aren't in the Reverend Increase Mather's sermons.

Based on traditional New England legends, these eerie tales of peddlers and parsons and seafarers are filled with a wry wit and a seemly respect for the powers of the invisible world.

Genres: Folklore, Fiction, Witches, Short Stories

132 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1977

About the author

Marilynne K. Roach, a life-long resident of Watertown, Massachusetts, graduated with a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and credits the public library system for the rest of her education.

Besides illustrating other writers' works on history, how-to, and horticulture she has written and illustrated several books of her own.

Reviews

[Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

While these ten stories are, as Roach states, not "folklore in its pristine form... set down in the exact phrases of an ancient oral tradition," they are all drawn from actual New England lore (the title is a riff on Cotton Mather's The Wonders of the Invisible World), re-told and embellished somewhat by the author, who in some cases combined elements of stories, or drew on folkloric elements common in other traditions. Some show more literary embellishment than others, while some, like "The Ghost in the Shed," exhibit the spare, unadorned style characteristic of an oral tale. But in no case are they re-worked with a very elaborate literary quality: the prose is uniformly simple and straightforward, the plots linear and direct, and there is not a heavy use of detail or much psychological reflection. These features --and a text written in fairly large script, with several black-and-white drawings by the author-- make this a quick, easy read. The settings of the tales are the 18th or 19th centuries, and a few period terms used, such as "syllabub," might not be familiar to most kids (and many adults); but otherwise the book would be as suitable for older kids as for adults. (There is no sex or directly-described violence, and only a single d-word in one selection.) While some of the stories involve murder, pacts with the devil and actually or potentially lethal supernatural phenomena, the tone doesn't create a high fear factor (my Goodreads friend Carol's term in her comment below, "good-scary," is probably applicable, depending on how it was intended. :-)). A few of the stories have a humorous tone.

Roach's concluding Notes explain precisely which elements of each story come from actual folklore, and which are her own additions. (This part was quite interesting to me, and earned the book a place on my folklore shelf, as well as my supernatural fiction shelf.) "The Disappearance of Peter Rugg" draws on a tale which, unlike the rest, I had run across before, as a kid in grade school. Ironically, this turns out to be the one instance where the premise is NOT a genuine folk legend, but a purely fictional literary short story made up by one William Austin, and published in 1824; Roach has condensed and in places reworded the story, and brought it down into the 20th century.