Customer Reviews

Shadows and Cypress: Southern Ghost Stories

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Shadows and Cypress: Southern Ghost Stories is the best collection of ghost stories I've seen. Many have been gathered from the old WPA collections, and many have been collected in the oral tradition. Dr. Brown is an expert on the classification of folk lore. His expertise in this area is evident. The collection includes selections suitable for use by all ages.

I usually love ghost stories, and being from the south I thought I would love the stories in this book, but I was a little disappointed. It was ok, but some of the stories were a little silly.

I love to read peoples accounts of local legends, ghost stories or folktales where the author doesn't give his or her own spin but merely relates the story as told. This book gives you a rare chance to do just that. "Shadows and Cypress" brings together 187 short ghost stories that the author collected with the help of his students, and from the WPA folklore collections.

People need to know, this book is different from most ghost story books written today...

Most ghost books are full of stories that have been re-written and dramatized by the author and there's usually a satisfying explanation for the haunting. Brown presents these stories exactly as they were told; "warts n' all." Here there's often no reason for a haunting, someone just relates a scary experience they had. These stories rarely obey any "rules of literature" either -- information one might expect at the beginning may be at the end of the story, however the person decides to include it. The stories can be quite short at times, a page, half-page or a mere ten lines in one case, and often the original dialect is preserved.

This is one of the most scholarly books of ghost tales you will read - there are extensive annotations with motifs noted, such as "headless ghost," "ghost with lantern," etc. There's a helpful bibliography with notes by the author about what to expect from similar books.

This isn't a book designed to scare you (although a few of the tales are creepy) this book exists primarily to preserve the storytelling tradition in the South. All of that said I can't think of a drawback with this book, except that it may not be what some people are looking for.

Other books in the oral tradition with stories that haven't been re-written are:-

-W. K. McNeil's "Ghost Stories from the American South"
-Alan Brown's "The Face in the Window and Other Alabama Ghostlore"
-Ray Browne's "A Night with the Hants"
-William Montell's "Ghosts across Kentucky" and "Haunted Houses and Family Ghosts of Kentucky"

Great book! Very fast read because I just could not put it down until I was done!

Shadows and Cypress: Southern Ghost Stories is the best collection of ghost stories I've seen. Many have been gathered from the old WPA collections, and many have been collected in the oral tradition. Dr. Brown is an expert on the classification of folk lore. His expertise in this area is evident. The collection includes selections suitable for use by all ages.

watch what you say about how people talk,im from central florida and have lived here my entire life,just because i'm country,live on a dirt road and have a southern draw don't mean i'm stupid and can't talk right or in jibberish. if you ask me you damn yankees are the dumb illiterate ones and need to learn how to talk....moral of this is SHUT UP!!! YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOUR TALKING ABOUT

Ive read quite a few ghost story books the past few months and I found this to be one of lesser quality. The author uses actual dialect with the storytellers accent, I found it most annoying making it a hard read at times.( I dont speak or read southern backwoods uneducated jibberish!! ) Some of the stories told were interesting, although I much prefer real ghost accounts over urban legend type. Instead read any of the books by Troy Taylor, Coast to Coast Ghosts, or Ghosts Of Key West.