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The Doctor to the Dead: Grotesque Legends and Folk Tales of Old Charleston
"You ask for a story. I will tell you one, fact for fact and true for true." So begins "Crook-Neck Dick," one of twenty-three stories in this beguiling collection of Charleston lore. Derived from African American legends, these fables have entertained generations of Charlestonians with sheer storytelling magic. To delight of folklorists, students of Charleston history, and all those who love a good ghost story, this treasure features photos of the storytellers who shared these remarkable stories with John Bennett.
Julia Eichelberger, the Marybelle Higgins Howe Professor of Southern Literature and an executive board member of the Center for Study of Slavery at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, provides a foreword.
Julia Eichelberger, the Marybelle Higgins Howe Professor of Southern Literature and an executive board member of the Center for Study of Slavery at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, provides a foreword.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1946
16 people are currently reading
508 people want to read
About the author
John Bennett
27 books5 followersJohn Bennett wrote and illustrated children's books. He was born in Chillicothe, Ohio. He wrote The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo with Seventeen other Laughable Tales and 200 Comical Silhouettes, which won the Newbery Honor in 1929.
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
John^^^Bennett
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
John^^^Bennett
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 18, 2022
The stories here were collected and “interpreted” by John Bennett in the first part of the 20th century, the “Charleston Renaissance” of which Bennett was one of the original members. Bennett himself was originally from Ohio and maybe that helped make him sympathize with the fascinating Gullah stories he sought out. The Gullah people were originally from a number of tribes in Western Africa who had been enslaved and forced to work and live on rice, cotton and indigo plantations around Charleston SC and its barrier islands. The original storytellers were entirely poor people now post Civil War, trying to get by. They generously shared oral stories with Bennett.
The stories are incredible. There are no anonymous crumbly European castles. They aren’t needed for this kind of gothic. This is the Low Country Carolina and Charleston that you can still see to a degree today. The first of the stories are more or less in the traditional scary vein though. Think Edgar A. Poe. As it happens, Poe spent a year on Sullivan’s Island offshore Charleston in his brief army career. His story “The Gold Bug” takes place there. Although it’s one of his detective type stories, not horror, it shares some atmosphere with stories in Bennett’s book. It’s probably blasphemy, but I like Bennett’s style better than Poe’s. In the subtitle “Grotesque Legends …” I think grotesque means more than ugly. Strange, mysterious and frightening come to mind.
The stories include spiritualism, folk medicine, conjuring, magic and mojo. This would have been shared wisdom among the Gullah. Gullah language developed so that the different groups of West Africans enslaved in the Low Country area could understand each other and to keep white overseers from eavesdropping. A couple of short stories that Bennett included try to reproduce the language and I think fail miserably. Thank goodness he gave up on that.
The stories included are undeniably creepy. Bennett has a way with Charleston gothic. The places, the vegetation, the smells and the often oppressive climate are all recognizable. The first story deals with reanimation, something that immediately brings Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to mind. Just think Spanish moss and neglected Charleston burial grounds. People often get more than what they ask for … a lot more. You meet conjurers, practitioners and sometimes Death or the devil himself. The army of the dead may arise in your neighborhood if you happen to live on the street where an old Civil War hospital and burial ground once stood. On stormy nights if you smell muddy leather, hear the tramp of army boots and sense steam rising from ghost horses, stay away from your windows.
I just can’t recommend this highly enough. Also perfect for the Halloween season.
The stories are incredible. There are no anonymous crumbly European castles. They aren’t needed for this kind of gothic. This is the Low Country Carolina and Charleston that you can still see to a degree today. The first of the stories are more or less in the traditional scary vein though. Think Edgar A. Poe. As it happens, Poe spent a year on Sullivan’s Island offshore Charleston in his brief army career. His story “The Gold Bug” takes place there. Although it’s one of his detective type stories, not horror, it shares some atmosphere with stories in Bennett’s book. It’s probably blasphemy, but I like Bennett’s style better than Poe’s. In the subtitle “Grotesque Legends …” I think grotesque means more than ugly. Strange, mysterious and frightening come to mind.
The stories include spiritualism, folk medicine, conjuring, magic and mojo. This would have been shared wisdom among the Gullah. Gullah language developed so that the different groups of West Africans enslaved in the Low Country area could understand each other and to keep white overseers from eavesdropping. A couple of short stories that Bennett included try to reproduce the language and I think fail miserably. Thank goodness he gave up on that.
The stories included are undeniably creepy. Bennett has a way with Charleston gothic. The places, the vegetation, the smells and the often oppressive climate are all recognizable. The first story deals with reanimation, something that immediately brings Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to mind. Just think Spanish moss and neglected Charleston burial grounds. People often get more than what they ask for … a lot more. You meet conjurers, practitioners and sometimes Death or the devil himself. The army of the dead may arise in your neighborhood if you happen to live on the street where an old Civil War hospital and burial ground once stood. On stormy nights if you smell muddy leather, hear the tramp of army boots and sense steam rising from ghost horses, stay away from your windows.
I just can’t recommend this highly enough. Also perfect for the Halloween season.
May 13, 2023
A chilling 240-page book that consists of supernatural stories that probably have been told countless times on a dark night by a campfire, or anywhere that there was a willing audience wishing for a good ghost story that leaves the question open as to is it real or is it fiction? They originate primarily from the Negro folk stories of old southern heritage from Charleston, South Carolina. These stories are tales of death...of mystery...and of bizarre incredibility's. It's composed of four long narratives, and eighteen short sketches, that range from diabolic influence, to demanding unrelenting ghosts...buried treasure...enchantments...miracles...visitations...and the dead that are dead but certainly not entirely dead. The tales are said to be based on a leading Charleston physician who falls in love with the ghost of a woman long since dead and buried. He becomes so obsessed with the condition of the dead in general that he ostracizes the conventional medical community and devotes the rest of his life to their care. They're not your average ghost stories in spite of the description, but anyone that loves history, especially southern history with a huge ghostly twist, will find this book fascinating. I found that the dialogue in which the stories were told to be a bit tedious to follow, and I was born and raised in the south.... hence the 4-star rating.
November 14, 2025
A collection of Southern gothic tales, mostly from the Gullah tradition around Charleston. My favorite stories are the ones where the (stubborn) dead refuse to believe they are dead. And the Devil-trained fiddler. Overall it's an excellent collection of tales & definitely recommended if you're into local Southern folklore with a macabre twist.
March 1, 2018
Here's some superb weird fiction no one's ever heard of. Bennett is not in any of the standard encyclopedias of horror fiction available to me, and his entry in the Clute-Grant Encyclopedia of Fantasy merely directs you to their entry on folktales.
It's true that Bennett drew on Gullah folklore for his stories, but modern editions of the book and modern reviewers are quite misleading in implying that he was little more than an ethno-stenographer. Yes, three of the shortest and least important stories are presented in an approximation of Gullah dialect, and others are elegant but relatively unelaborated retellings of stories that came to him more or less intact from a folk tradition. But the three longest and most substantial of the stories are extravaganzas of invention in which folk material seems to have provided only the vaguest outline, or an occasional image or idea.
Bennett's own introduction (written in 1946) is affectionate and generous toward the sources of his inspiration, which has likely encouraged this misconception; but his private correspondence makes very clear that he regarded himself as the auteur of these stories, and that he was "transforming" what he called "folk-stuff" into "rich and strange" literature ("This . . . will call for every ounce of wit I possess."). He clearly did not see himself as a folklorist, but as a creative artist working in a literary idiom which had nothing to do with the Gullah: "I am trying---have been trying, all summer, with little success---to shape my Grotesque Legends and Contes Droles, etc.---to create an atmosphere somewhere between Frangonard's romance, Gustave Doré's mystery and an old German Dance of Death, with a little touch of Botticelli's wistful pallor. . . ." Apropos the story called "Madame Margot", he commented with justifiable pride on his stylistic brilliance: ". . . I have written singular English singularly well, and lent true loveliness, wistful beauty and tragic charm to a drab and sordid story, made an atmosphere original, not like aught that anyone anywhere has produced before, and created the unreal."
Bennett's relationship to folk sources puts me in mind of Lafcadio Hearn, who made similarly exquisite use of Oriental tales, although it is my impression that Hearn hewed much closer to his sources. It is ironic and unfortunate that while Hearn is regarded as an important writer in his own right, Bennett is wholly forgotten.
Bennett started working on his stories at the turn of the century, and readers will immediately perceive his kinship with the Decadents; his morbidity, grotesquerie, and eroticism would not be out of place in the world of Baudelaire and Level, and the book's title story, "The Doctor to the Dead", the longest and best of his creations, might have made the pages of the Yellow Book (Bennett himself thought that his stories "might aptly have been illustrated by Doré, Daumier, Goya, Böcklin, Stück, or Aubrey Beardsley."). His stately prose, punctuated with irony that does not detract from the sombre tone, has something of Wilde in it.
Rather than attempt to describe his style, and his superb control of detail, I offer passages from a fine moment in "The Doctor to the Dead", in which the Doctor contemplates a ruined tomb, and encounters its occupant:
Beneath the roots of the olive tree, two hundred years before, a woman had been buried. A marble slab, once deeply carved, had worn her long-obliterated name. The inverted torch and shattered hourglass graved upon the slab were fretted quite away. A handful of dust among the roots of the olive tree was all that remained of her beauty. Even the planks of her coffin were completely rotted away; nothing remained but the copper nails, corroded clots of green outlining the casket in the earth; the copper coffin plate which once had borne her name was indecipherable.
Who she was, or what she had been, it is useless to recall; perhaps it were better so; no record remains, other than that she was beautiful; and Death is skeptical of women's beauty, knowing the havoc of the worm. The rest remains uncertain; but that she was beautiful is certain. Among the lovely woman of a city, where many women had been beautiful, she was reputed to have been the loveliest. But Death had claimed her in the bloom of her maidenhood, and all her beauty had been wasted in the dust. . .
As he thus brooded on beauty's waste, she rose like a wild spring flower among the canes, too delicate, too fragile for existence, and stood for a moment in the moonlight as if waking from her sleep, her eyes half shut, stretching out her white arms, and shaking the dust from her yellow hair. . . She had been buried in a ball gown with dancing slippers on her feet. Her garments were yellow as saffron with the stain of time.
Naturally he falls in love with her. She tells him:
"Nay, it is useless," she sighed. "With each touch of your lips I taste, not heart's delight, but the bitterness of death. . . Our kisses taste of graveyard mold. Yesterday I heard the swallows calling, and a bird sang over my grave. I tried to sing; but my mouth was full of sand. Today a rose bloomed on my grave, its beauty born of the dust; and all the while my heart cried, remembering that it was dead. Oh, that the dead should be so dead! There is not enough love in all this graveyard to fill a teaspoon. . . ."
The stained ball gown and slippers should be enough to earn Bennett some love from connoisseurs of the macabre.
It's true that Bennett drew on Gullah folklore for his stories, but modern editions of the book and modern reviewers are quite misleading in implying that he was little more than an ethno-stenographer. Yes, three of the shortest and least important stories are presented in an approximation of Gullah dialect, and others are elegant but relatively unelaborated retellings of stories that came to him more or less intact from a folk tradition. But the three longest and most substantial of the stories are extravaganzas of invention in which folk material seems to have provided only the vaguest outline, or an occasional image or idea.
Bennett's own introduction (written in 1946) is affectionate and generous toward the sources of his inspiration, which has likely encouraged this misconception; but his private correspondence makes very clear that he regarded himself as the auteur of these stories, and that he was "transforming" what he called "folk-stuff" into "rich and strange" literature ("This . . . will call for every ounce of wit I possess."). He clearly did not see himself as a folklorist, but as a creative artist working in a literary idiom which had nothing to do with the Gullah: "I am trying---have been trying, all summer, with little success---to shape my Grotesque Legends and Contes Droles, etc.---to create an atmosphere somewhere between Frangonard's romance, Gustave Doré's mystery and an old German Dance of Death, with a little touch of Botticelli's wistful pallor. . . ." Apropos the story called "Madame Margot", he commented with justifiable pride on his stylistic brilliance: ". . . I have written singular English singularly well, and lent true loveliness, wistful beauty and tragic charm to a drab and sordid story, made an atmosphere original, not like aught that anyone anywhere has produced before, and created the unreal."
Bennett's relationship to folk sources puts me in mind of Lafcadio Hearn, who made similarly exquisite use of Oriental tales, although it is my impression that Hearn hewed much closer to his sources. It is ironic and unfortunate that while Hearn is regarded as an important writer in his own right, Bennett is wholly forgotten.
Bennett started working on his stories at the turn of the century, and readers will immediately perceive his kinship with the Decadents; his morbidity, grotesquerie, and eroticism would not be out of place in the world of Baudelaire and Level, and the book's title story, "The Doctor to the Dead", the longest and best of his creations, might have made the pages of the Yellow Book (Bennett himself thought that his stories "might aptly have been illustrated by Doré, Daumier, Goya, Böcklin, Stück, or Aubrey Beardsley."). His stately prose, punctuated with irony that does not detract from the sombre tone, has something of Wilde in it.
Rather than attempt to describe his style, and his superb control of detail, I offer passages from a fine moment in "The Doctor to the Dead", in which the Doctor contemplates a ruined tomb, and encounters its occupant:
Beneath the roots of the olive tree, two hundred years before, a woman had been buried. A marble slab, once deeply carved, had worn her long-obliterated name. The inverted torch and shattered hourglass graved upon the slab were fretted quite away. A handful of dust among the roots of the olive tree was all that remained of her beauty. Even the planks of her coffin were completely rotted away; nothing remained but the copper nails, corroded clots of green outlining the casket in the earth; the copper coffin plate which once had borne her name was indecipherable.
Who she was, or what she had been, it is useless to recall; perhaps it were better so; no record remains, other than that she was beautiful; and Death is skeptical of women's beauty, knowing the havoc of the worm. The rest remains uncertain; but that she was beautiful is certain. Among the lovely woman of a city, where many women had been beautiful, she was reputed to have been the loveliest. But Death had claimed her in the bloom of her maidenhood, and all her beauty had been wasted in the dust. . .
As he thus brooded on beauty's waste, she rose like a wild spring flower among the canes, too delicate, too fragile for existence, and stood for a moment in the moonlight as if waking from her sleep, her eyes half shut, stretching out her white arms, and shaking the dust from her yellow hair. . . She had been buried in a ball gown with dancing slippers on her feet. Her garments were yellow as saffron with the stain of time.
Naturally he falls in love with her. She tells him:
"Nay, it is useless," she sighed. "With each touch of your lips I taste, not heart's delight, but the bitterness of death. . . Our kisses taste of graveyard mold. Yesterday I heard the swallows calling, and a bird sang over my grave. I tried to sing; but my mouth was full of sand. Today a rose bloomed on my grave, its beauty born of the dust; and all the while my heart cried, remembering that it was dead. Oh, that the dead should be so dead! There is not enough love in all this graveyard to fill a teaspoon. . . ."
The stained ball gown and slippers should be enough to earn Bennett some love from connoisseurs of the macabre.
January 17, 2009
John Bennett retells of some of Charleston's favorite, yet dark and sometimes creepytales of the supernatural. Thank goodness he recognized the importance of the Gullah tradition and Gullah culture so that he tells these stories with reverence and with relish. The tone of the book is decidedly old-fashioned, yet it also remains true to the dark, gothic spirit that was probably used by the original African-American storytellers as they sat on their rickety back stoops and shared their stories. The reader, too, will relish these tales and will be transported to the shabby, romantic, mysterious Charleston of the early 20th Century.
I love walking around town and trying to figure out the locations of some of these tales. We certainly have enough rickety back porches and old houses. I think many of Bennett's tales are the basis of some of our local "Ghost Tours" that haunt the city street and entertain the tourists.
I love walking around town and trying to figure out the locations of some of these tales. We certainly have enough rickety back porches and old houses. I think many of Bennett's tales are the basis of some of our local "Ghost Tours" that haunt the city street and entertain the tourists.
August 27, 2013
Wonderful years of research into the Gullah tales of Charleston - bizarre yet real! Good introduction to the Afro-American legends of old Charleston!
November 9, 2024
Great to read before a trip to Charleston.
July 23, 2016
I'm becoming very fond of old folklore and folktales written in dialect, even if that isn't particularly politically correct. With the rhythm and sound of the accents of different cultures being goobled up by the pervasive Americanized speech from television, it's not a bad way of preserving these old ways of talking and telling tales.
This volume is full of stories which I have never seen before - which is enough all by itself to reccomend it. As the title suggests, all the stories center around stories of hoodoo, wandering spirits, necromancy, and hexes gone wrong. All the tales are are very well told. Although the original copyright is 1943, the stories seem to come from a time well before that. Perhaps the author has collected tales from the childhood of local people.
In any case, you'll enjoy this book a great deal if you savor the taste of the macabre, served up with more than a touch of the dialect which people spoke in the old South when they told their tales. There is magic afoot; and it's not all nice, but it is always entertaining.
This volume is full of stories which I have never seen before - which is enough all by itself to reccomend it. As the title suggests, all the stories center around stories of hoodoo, wandering spirits, necromancy, and hexes gone wrong. All the tales are are very well told. Although the original copyright is 1943, the stories seem to come from a time well before that. Perhaps the author has collected tales from the childhood of local people.
In any case, you'll enjoy this book a great deal if you savor the taste of the macabre, served up with more than a touch of the dialect which people spoke in the old South when they told their tales. There is magic afoot; and it's not all nice, but it is always entertaining.
March 1, 2015
having just recently visited Charleston, I found these stories very entertaining and easy to imagine the scenery, even considering how long ago they took place. I read it to fill in a spot on my library's new year's resolution checklist- and am very happy I chose it!
Currently reading
October 14, 2012I loved it. I am a fan of gothic style writing, especially from the South. I live near Charleston and find it very fascinating.
Want to read
May 13, 2017I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/12883837
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/12883837
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews