This is a transcription of Halloween: About 31% More Gothic than Normal
David: Hello. Welcome to Strong Sense of Place.
Melissa: In each episode, we focus on one destination and discuss what makes it different than any other place on Earth.
David: Then we recommend five books we love that took us there on the page.
Melissa: I’m Melissa Joulwan.
David: I’m David Humphreys.
David: We’re going around the world one great read at a time. Thanks for joining us.
[cheerful music]
David: Welcome to Strong Sense of Place. Today we get curious about Halloween. In Two Truths and a Lie, we’ll talk about one of the largest nighttime gatherings in the world and the mind behind it all. Then we’ll talk about five books we love.
Melissa: I’m recommending a cozy witch story with a few kinda scary bits, a friendly spider, and homemade blackberry pie.
David: I read two novels about women dealing with loss — couldn’t be more different. One mixes horror and a deadpan sense of humor; the other sprints through the shadows in a subway station and mixes in ancient Asian ghost rituals. But first, Mel’s going to bring us up to speed with the Halloween 101.
Melissa: Before we get into today’s spooky business, I want to remind everyone that this is not our first Halloween episode. We celebrated Halloween with episode #17 in 2020. In that show, we talked about the origins of Halloween, a zombie preparedness plan, and the laws around selling a haunted house.
Melissa: Then we recommended a slew of books including two non-scary Halloween novels, a melancholy Scottish ghost story, a book in verse, a fall classic by Ray Bradbury, an eerie YA novel with legit scares, and the bloody story of four authors trapped in a slasher plot. I’ll put a link to that episode in show notes in case you want to double-down on Halloween with us.
Melissa: Today, I thought it would be fun to talk about three fantastic places to celebrate Halloween in real life.
Melissa: As always, it was challenging to narrow down my picks to just three. For example, if you wanted to go to the biggest Halloween street party in Europe, you could visit Londonderry, Ireland. Their Halloween festical is called ‘Awakening the Walled City.’ [DAVE - street performers, light show, parade] Or you could bop over to Edinburgh, Scotland instead. They celebrate the Samhuinn Fire Festival on the Royal Mile — that’s the cobbled street that leads to Edinburgh Castle. The Fire Festival is a modern twist on a Celtic festival that includes fire play, drumming, and a dramatic stand-off between the Summer and Winter Kings.
Melissa: And of course, you could head to Salem, Massachusetts, to party with the witches. They have many varieties of witch walking tours, drag karaoke, spiritualism tours, a ghost story trolley ride through town, and an epic parade.
Melissa: Obviously, I’m ready to sign up for all of that. But for our imaginary Halloween itinerary this year, I chose devilish destinations in Eastern Europe, the US, and the UK. Pack some salt and garlic in our carry on.
Melissa: Our first stop is Transylvania, Romania. It looks like a vintage postcard with rolling green hills, medieval villages with orange tile roofs, old Saxon forts, and Gothic castles. The name Transylvania means ‘land beyond the forest,’ and the Carpathian Mountains that border it are some of the last virgin forests in Europe. Among the oaks and silver firs, you’ll find many brown bears and Vlad Ţepeş, aka, Vlad the Impaler, the real-life Wallachian prince who may have inspired the legend of Dracula.
Melissa: Transylvania is a fantastic place to eat cheese and sausages and drink local wine — or go hiking in the hills, visit a salt mine, or stay on a working farm. But in October, the locals really lean into their connection to vampire folklore.
Melissa: Sighișoara is a medieval town with narrow cobbled lanes and houses painted in pastel ice-cream colors. Looming over it all is a spiky Gothic clock tower that dates back to the 1300s, which means it was there when Vlad Ţepeş drew his first breath in a stone house a few streets away.
Melissa: On Halloween night, you can attend the Great Dracula Ball in the Sighișoara Citadel. The costume ball begins at 7:00 p.m. when each guest is announced by Lord Stewart. That’s followed by a gourmet dinner, a ballet called Vampiresa Hunting, and an immersive show that re-enacts the staking of a vampire. Anyone still dancing at 2:00 a.m. is invited to take the Survivor’s Oath.
Melissa: Or, you could go to the walled city of Brașov and nearby Bran Castle. It’s a Gothic pile with cone-topped turrets and asymmetrical towers perched on a hill surrounded by dense forest. It’s become known as Dracula’s Castle. And on October 30, it’s hosting Dracula’s Vampire Ball.
Melissa: Only 100 souls will be admitted to the Castle after hours, along with a coven of Romanian witches. The evening of dinner, dancing, and storytelling is hosted by Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew Dacre, a Dracula historian. You can’t stay overnight at the castle, there’s a luxurious chalet that’s just a four minute walk away — if you’re not too frightened to walk along a moonlit road.
Melissa: Our next stop is the Hudson Valley in New York — the village of Sleepy Hollow. You probably know it as the setting for Washington Irving’s tale of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’
Melissa: Washington Irving was born in New York City in 1783. When he was a teenager, there was a yellow fever outbreak in Manhattan, so he went to stay with friends in Tarrytown, nearby to Sleepy Hollow. He fell in love with the bucolic countryside and the local ghost stories. A few years later when he became a writer, he used the area as the setting for ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’ When he was 52, he bought a little Gothic revival cottage there that he named Sunnyside. Today it’s a museum and during Spooky Season, you can take a special Halloween tour.
Melissa: As you might expect, Sleepy Hollow has lots of spine-chilling events. There’s the Great Jack O’Lantern Blaze. That’s a display of 7000 illuminated jack-o-lanterns all carved by hand by local artists. There’s a bonfire and a pumpkin planetarium and a circus ghost train. And, of course, the Headless Horseman wanders the grounds.
Melissa: At the 18th-century Philipsburg Manor house, there’s a walking tour called the ‘Headless Horseman Files.’ It’s a live-action whodunit with actors playing characters from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, including Katrina Van Tassel and Brom Bones. Guests have to put together clues to figure out what really happened to Ichabod Crane. There’s also a storytelling night with a faux Edgar Alan Poe that begins at the library and ends in a theater with cocktails and chocolates.
Melissa: The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where Washington Irving is buried, gives tours all year, including a 2-hour nighttime lantern tour. This year for Halloween, they also have a murder mystery night and a storyteller performing The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Melissa: Our last stop is the most haunted city in Europe: York, England. York has been around for almost 2000 years. That’s a lot of time for people to leave their spiritual mark on a place. It was founded by the Romans in 71 AD, conquered by the Vikings about 1000 years later, and then, in medieval times, became a religious center and major trading hub. You can still walk along the old Roman city walls and visit forbidding Gothic stone works like the York Minster cathedral, York Castle, and the narrow street called The Shambles.
Melissa: The Shambles dates back to the 14th century. It’s a higgledy-piggledy neighborhood with narrow lanes. The timber-framed buildings that line the alleys look like they leapt from the pages of Grimm’s fairytales and feel like they’re hunching over you as you walk. Back in the day, The Shambles was home to many butchers, and its comes from Old English for ‘flesh shelves.’
Melissa: Today, the old butchers shops have been replaced with trinket shops, bookstores, and cafes. Which brings us to our first stop: The York Ghost Merchants. Located at number 6 on The Shambles, The York Ghost Merchantes are purveyors of fine, handmade ceramic ghosts. The only ghost merchants still trading in the twenty-first century. The shop was built in 1780. It’s lined with oak-paneled walls and whimsical shelves that display hundreds of ghosts.
Melissa: In October, the Ghost Merchants host York Ghost Week, a city-wide celebration of history and friendly ghouls with dozens of events. There’s an evening scavenger hunt for ghosts hidden in the backstreets around the York Minster cathedral. There’s a Charles Dickens ghost storytelling night at the York Medical Society, which looks exactly like you might expect a Victorian medical society to look.
Melissa: My favorite might be the quest for a handmade Guild Coin. Back in the 15th century, York was home to 96 craft guilds, including bakers, brewers, shoemakers, goldsmiths, glovers, and scriveners. Today, there are only seven left, mostly operating as charities and historical societies. To honor the guilds, brass plaques are located around town. During Ghost Week, you can buy a wallet that includes a map, rubbing paper, and a pencil, then you collect five plaque rubbings to earn the special Guild Coin.
Melissa: Also near The Shambles is Ghosts in the Garden. It’s a free art trail that features 58 translucent, wire-mesh sculptures of ghostly figures. There are ladies in long dresses and veils, horsemen in Regency soldiers’ uniforms, a Victorian child playing the violin, and a cat drinking from a pond. During the day, they look like they’re made of smoke, and at night, they’re lit up to look like glowing apparitions. I found a short video I’ll put in show notes.
Melissa: If you’d like to armchair travel to Transylvania, Sleepy Hollow, and York, I’ll put a list of books in show notes that will take you to all those places on the page.
Melissa: To close, I want to share a short poem. The York Ghost Merchants have ghostly short stories and poems on their site. This is one of the winners of their poetry contest. It’s called ‘Amongst Us’ and it’s by Gemma Richards.
Bewilderedly they stray
Tethered, bound to stay.
Melissa: That’s the Halloween 101.
David: I’m about to say three statements. Two are true. Mel doesn’t know which is the lie. Statement one: In Colorado, they have coffin races. Statement two: There’s a folklorist in New England who’s been exhuming suspected vampires for decades. He says, ‘This is the tip of the iceberg.’ And statement three: The largest nighttime parade in the United States was started by a self-proclaimed witch.
David: Let’s take them one at a time. In Colorado, they have coffin races.
Melissa: True!
David: That is true! This story begins in the late 1880s with a young woman named Emma Crawford. She was musical—known for her skill at the piano—and she was dying of what they then called consumption, what we’d call tuberculosis. Doctors told her what they told many patients at the time: go west. The mineral springs and high, dry air of Colorado might save her. So she left Massachusetts, traveled to the foot of Pikes Peak, and settled in Manitou Springs. But the cure never came. In December of 1891, Emma Crawford died. She was only in her thirties.
David: Before her death, she made a final request: that she be buried on Red Mountain, the mountain rising just beyond the town. Friends and neighbors honored that. They hauled her coffin up the slope—and laid her to rest near the summit.
David: But the mountain did not keep her. When a railroad project later needed space on the summit, Emma’s coffin was reburied lower, on a loose, gravelly slope. Over the decades, erosion gnawed away at the hillside. In the 1920s, heavy rains and loose soil did what time does—they dislodged the coffin. Emma and her coffin came sliding down Red Mountain.
David: In August of 1929, two boys exploring the hillside found a skull. They brought it to authorities. Other fragments turned up as well: Emma’s nameplate, a few bones, some coffin hardware. There was no family left to claim her, no one to ensure her a dignified resting place. So what was left of Emma Crawford was gathered and reburied in an unmarked grave.
David: And that’s where the story might have ended: a lost woman, and an unquiet burial. But Manitou Springs had a long memory, and Emma would eventually return, in a way, to ride down Red Mountain again.
David: Jump to the 1990s. Manitou is still artsy, a little eccentric, and they’re thinking they need an event to pull together their community. The Chamber of Commerce leans into the Crawford story and says: what if we make that tragic slide a ritual of remembrance? In 1995, Manitou launched the first Emma Crawford Coffin Races. It stuck because it feels exactly like the town: a little spooky, playful, and very communal.
David: And now, every October, the town throws a costume parade at noon, and then lines the avenue for the main event: a 195-yard dash with a team of five — four pushers and one ‘Emma’ — piloting a homemade coffin. If you picture something between a traditional coffin and a bobsled with wheels, you’re going in the right direction.
David: The rules are simple. Three of the four pushers must keep hands on the coffin to the finish, the fastest time wins. There are also ‘show’ trophies: for Best Coffin, Best Emma, and Best Entourage. It’s a little bit sporting event, a little bit street theater. Some teams come as undertakers with derby hats; others as UFO crews wheeling a neon sarcophagus. There’s always a few historical entries: Victorians with veils, a piano motif for Emma the musician. That kind of thing.
David: The event has a strong Halloween vibe. The crowd is a sea of costumes: kids with vampire teeth, and retirees with steampunk goggles. Afterward, the town returns to its shops and bars, the confetti gets swept, and Emma, the young ghost at the piano, is remembered with laughter and applause.
David: If you want go or race this year, it’s doable: registration closes October 17, and race day is Saturday, October 25. If you do go: wear a costume, and consider the shuttles—parking gets pricey.
David: And I should mention that the coffin races have spread. Denton, Texas has a Day of the Dead festival. And Estes Park, Colorado has a ‘Frozen Dead Guy’ festival that includes coffin racing. In their version, the coffin is carried through a muddy field. Judging from the footage I found online, booze might be involved. That happens in March.
David: Next one: There’s a folklorist in New England who’s been exhuming suspected vampires for decades. He says, ‘This is the tip of the iceberg.’
David: There’s a folklorist in New England who has spent decades chasing ‘vampires’ in town ledgers, family scrapbooks, and church records. His name is Michael E. Bell. He’s logged about eighty exhumations of graves from the late 1700s through the 1890s, and he thinks there are hundreds more hiding in the archives, just ‘the tip of the iceberg.’ 
David: These New England vampires are not caped aristocrats skulking around lighthouses. These were neighbors trying desperately to rescue their families from consumption — tuberculosis. The same thing that did in Emma.
David: TB is still a monster: it spreads through the air, hollows you out over months. In 2023 it killed an estimated 1 and a quarter million people worldwide. In the 1800s, before antibiotics, it was a slow, public tragedy: the weight loss, the night sweats, the blood on a handkerchief. 
David: The folk logic went like this: if your household kept dying, someone recently buried might be preying on the living. So communities dug. They opened a grave, checked the organs for ‘freshness,’ burned the heart or liver, and sometimes mixed the ashes with water as a cure for the sick. Ministers noted it in diaries; small papers printed it and scolded it as barbaric; Thoreau even wrote about an exhumation in his journal. 
David: The most famous case reads like a gothic short story with Yankee overtones. In Exeter, Rhode Island, the Brown family was being undone by consumption. In January 1892, nineteen-year-old Mercy (Lena) Brown was exhumed after her mother and sister had died and her brother Edwin began to fail. A Providence Journal reporter was on hand as neighbors opened the grave. They found Mercy’s heart and liver unusually well-preserved. She’d been kept in a cold crypt through winter—so they burned the organs on a nearby stone. Edwin was given a potion of the ashes in water, a folk cure meant to break the vampire’s hold. He died a few weeks later, but the ritual fixed itself in local memory: neighbors doing what they could, in the only way they knew. 
David: A century later and a state away, we got another story by accident. In 1990 in Griswold, Connecticut, kids playing near a gravel mine found a skull. Let’s have a moment to think of the poor guy from the university who answered this call. He went out and found a small family cemetery. In that cemetery was a coffin that had been reopened and re-arranged years after burial. Inside, the bones had been set in a skull-and-crossbones pose; the skull set on top of crossed arms. The chest showed damage where someone likely reached for the heart. On the coffin lid, brass tacks spelled ‘JB 55’—initials and age at death. Thirty years later, DNA tied ‘JB55’ to a local Barber family. The ‘Connecticut vampire’ was almost certainly John Barber, a farmer who probably died of TB. He wasn’t a monster. He was a man who died a tough death, then became the focus of his community’s hope for a cure.  Did all of this vampire-searching get into Bram Stoker’s imagination? It’s often said that a Mercy Brown news clipping turned up among Stoker’s papers. But scholars point out he’d already started Dracula, so the influence is plausible but unproven. Maybe?
David: For me, the folklorist Bell, his gift is empathy. He shows that the ‘undead’ in New England are mostly fears that were keep alive. Halloween gives us rubber bats and capes and such; the real story underneath is very human—what do you do when you’re terrified? In Exeter and Griswold, a hundred-plus years ago, the answer was shovels, fire, and a prayer for mercy.
David: Last one! The largest nighttime parade in the United States was started by a self-proclaimed witch.
David: That’s a lie. Although the truth is every bit as good.
David: This story starts in Vermont. A quiet kid named Ralph Lee grew up in Middlebury in the 30s and 40s. While he’s growing up, he falls in love with masks and puppets, and he never quite got over it. He carved faces and stitched characters and put on shows for the neighborhood. He grows up, and he takes that obsession to New York City, where, on one particular Halloween night, it spilled into the streets and never went back inside. 
David: On Halloween, 1974, Lee and a circle of his friends stepped out of his studio carrying lanterns, herding kids, and guiding a procession of homemade giants toward Washington Square Park. By the next year, the procession had a name. By the end of the decade, it needed a bigger street. This was the beginning of the Village Halloween Parade.  David: Lee wasn’t a hype man. He was a theater artist who believed that a mask changes the wearer—and the watcher—and that the best place to practice that magic is outside. In the mid-’70s, the Theater for the New City helped him scale the stroll into a real production: sound systems, street marshals, a post-parade ball. Suddenly, you had giant skeletons ducking under deli awnings, a papier-mâché cat as tall as a stoplight, a devil zip-lining off the Washington Square arch. The rules were radical and simple: show up in costume and you’re in. 
David: As New York City discovered the parade, the parade grew. The route eventually moved to Sixth Avenue, where there’s more room for the spectacle. Last year, there was an estimated 50,000 costumed participants and more than 50 marching bands. Officials say that two million people watch along the barricades.
David: Some years, the parade carries more than mischief. After 9/11, the organizers led with a giant phoenix — wings pumping above a ring of lantern embers — and New Yorkers came out to keep going. The tradition survived hurricanes, a pandemic pause, and budget scares. When the parade returned in 2021, organizers called it the first major NYC event after COVID restrictions lifted—a small thing that felt big: people back in the street, together, on purpose.
David: The parade’s side characters are perfect New York: dozens of Broadway performers zombie-dance to “Thriller,” drag queens with feathered wings; a brass band that crashes into a drumline and somehow they both keep playing; and, up above, the giant spider that descends the Jefferson Market Library tower.  David: Lee went on to work in theater the rest of his life. If you remember the ‘Land Shark’ sketch on early Saturday Night Live, you’ve seen his work. He made that shark. Ralph Lee died in 2023, but the parade he started is very much alive. Every October, artists and neighbors pull new giants out of studios, volunteers get quick lessons in the physics of puppets, and thousands of New Yorkers put on whatever version of themselves they’ve been saving for this one night. If you want to march, the rule is still simple: come in costume and join the lineup at Canal & Sixth between 6:30 and 9. Then go north with the whole unruly carnival.
David: That’s Two Truths and a Lie.
Melissa: My first recommendation is ‘Daisy Darker’ by Alice Feeney. This is a wickedly fun riff on Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None.’ Instead of terrible people who are STRANGERS to each other, we get terrible people who are FAMILY — plus some additional twisty bits that are a wild ride.
Melissa: Our narrator is a young woman named Daisy Darker. Her family hasn’t seen each other for years, but now they’re gathering to celebrate their Nana’s 80th birthday.
Melissa: That’s the basic delicious white cake. Let’s add some sweet buttercream plot frosting. One, the birthday celebration is at Seaglass, a shabby chic Victorian mansion in Cornwall, England. Two, the house sits on a tidal island in Blacksand Bay. When the tide is high, the island is cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours. Three, Nana’s birthday gathering takes place on Halloween. And four, When the guests arrive, Nana announces that it’s not just a birthday party. She’s going to read them her final will and testament.
Melissa: From the outset, Daisy, our narrator, is very sympathetic. The first thing she tells us is ‘I was born with a broken heart.’She goes on to explain that she had a heart condition that almost killed her and her mom, but Daisy survived against all odds — and maybe, a little bit, to her family’s chagrin.
Melissa: She goes on, ‘The second time I died was exactly five years after I was born. My heart completely stopped on my fifth birthday… when I demanded too much of it by trying to swim to America. I wanted to run away, but was better at swimming, so hoped to reach New York by lunchtime with a bit of backstroke. I didn’t even make it out of Blacksand Bay and — technically — died trying.’
Melissa: She’s saved on that occasion by her elder sister Rose, but only because Rose had recently learned CPR. As Daisy says, ‘She’d earned her first aid badge at Brownies. Sometimes I suspect she regretted it. Saving me, I mean. She loved that badge.’
Melissa: The only person in Daisy’s family to love her unconditionally was her Nana. Beatrice Darker — Nana — is a bit eccentric. She has a sweet tooth and owns 80 clocks — one for each year of her life — to remind herself that her time is her own.
Melissa: She’s also the bestselling author of children’s book, including her most famous work ‘Daisy Darker’s Little Secret.’ It made Nana a small fortune and drove a wedge between Daisy and Nana on one side, and the rest of the family on the other. The author Alice Feeney does a bang-up job of introducing us to Daisy’s useless-slash-abusive parents, her selfish, grasping sisters, and the one nice family member: Her teenaged niece Trixie.
Melissa: So… the whole crew makes their way to Seaglass, named for the blue-green bits of glass that decorate its gray stone walls and Gothic turrets.
Melissa: The first family dinner is as delightfully dysfunctional as you suspect and hope it will be. A storm is rolling in over the water — and there’s equally dangerous thunder and lightning in the dining room. The atmosphere is claustrophobic, thick with distrust. And the house itself feels alive: floors creak, corners emanate darkness. Just as Nana is about to share the contents of her will, a surprise guest arrives to ratchet up the tension even further. Nana is delighted to see him — everyone else is… less enthusiastic.
Melissa: They all eventually retreat to their bedrooms, startled awake by a scream at midnight. They find Nana dead on the floor of the kitchen. And a poem has been written on the chalkboard in what looks like Nana’s handwriting. It says in part,
Melissa: It goes on to say something cutting about each of the other family members, and ends with this:
Melissa: The plot is propelled forward by a ticking clock — the ones on the wall and the movements of the ocean. Each chapter begins with the time and how many hours are left until low tide. And periodically, there are more snippets of poetry as the guests die, one by one. Along the way to sorting out the identity of the killer, we get luscious backstory: the family’s relationship to the late-arriving guest, the history of the house, revelations of long-held secrets and betrayals.
Melissa: It could all be too dark, but the recurring poems have a sinister glee — and in flashbacks, Nana is a source of sunshine.
Melissa: This is a fantastic whodunnit with Halloween vibes and dark whimsy. I found it impossible to put down. It’s ‘Daisy Darker’ by Alice Feeney.
David: My first book is ‘The September House’ from Carissa Orlando. This is a haunted house story. Unlike most haunted house stories, it starts with everything going full tilt. Almost.
David: There is a prologue. We meet a couple who have just found their dream house. They’re an older couple – Margaret and Hal. They’ve just sent their daughter to college. And they’re looking around a beautiful, old Victorian, and falling in love with it. It’s going to need a little work. And, on about page two, there’s this bit:
I am legally obligated to disclose to you that there was a death in this house,” the agent said, still catching her breath as she caught up to us on the third floor but not so out of sorts as to accidentally use the word “murder.
David: And a couple of lines later, Margaret, the narrator, says:
A house this old, you would almost expect something like that,’ I said, not even listening to my own words as I peered inside the closet. The closet!
David: And two pages later, they move in. And then chapter one starts with this line:
The walls of the house were bleeding again.
David: And we are into it.
David: It turns out that the house has a schedule: while the house is haunted around the year, every September, the blood starts; the moaning starts; by month’s end, you’re into full-on screaming. It’s hard to get a good night’s sleep in September. And Margaret handles it with the practical stubbornness of someone who has decided this is fine. She negotiates with the ghosts – who are fully members of the house. There’s Fredericka, an axe-wounded housekeeper who pours tea and occasionally stress, stacks furniture. There’s a little boy who likes to bite. Margaret describes dodging his fangs to get her toast like it’s just one more household nuisance. A leaky sink. Ants. Murdererous little boy. There are others. Margaret calls them ‘pranksters.’
David: From the beginning, I was aware that Margaret might be the strangest thing in this very strange house. She’s laser-focused on daily routines. She refuses to panic. Her husband Hal is missing — he left, won’t pick up the phone — and Margaret’s main concern is keeping the stairs dry. Her grown daughter, Katherine, is texting questions that Margaret is not answering. It’s funny and unnerving at the same time.
David: Before chapter one ends, we’re told two other bits. First: something awful lives in the basement, and the door is boarded over. Second: the adult daughter Katherine is coming whether Margaret wants her to or not, which means the family version of events — the story Margaret tells herself about this house — can’t hold forever.
David: As a reader, I got into this book, and after about three chapters, I was like, ‘How’s the author going to keep this up?’ We’ve already seen the monster. But then the book takes a turn into the why of it all: what families hide, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive, particularly in bad times.
David: There’s mental illness in the mix, and denial, and love that looks — at least from the outside — like madness. It’s still sometimes gleefully gross. But the heart of it turns, and you’re suddenly reading a book about a mother and a daughter and the long shadow cast by the things that maybe you don’t say out loud. And just when I was comfortable in that space, the book whips around again and lands a finale that is gruesome and satisfying.
David: Publishers Weekly said, this book is what would happen ‘“If P.G. Wodehouse had written The Amityville Horror,’ which is kind of perfect.
David: I should mention that the author Carissa Orlando is a doctor who works in children’s mental health. Her day job is improving access to care for kids and families. In an interview, she described herself as, ‘an unsalvageably nerdy psychologist who has never met a horror movie so bad I didn’t want to watch it.’
David: You can feel her experience in Margaret’s voice: the routines that look like denial from the outside; the way people build elaborate systems to function; and everything that’s buried under ‘I’m fine.’ At the same time, the story never becomes a case study. It stays a novel – but the truthiness is in there.
David: For audiobook folks, this is a good one. The narrator Kimberly Farr does a good job, she’s got the dry, motherly deadpan down — equally practical and unhinged.
David: If you like humor in your horro — the kind of domestic comedy that happens when your walls are bleeding and you still have to make breakfast. If you want a haunted house that is clearly haunted, with rules and consequences and a basement door you absolutely should not open. If you want a heroine who refuses to leave because the porch is perfect and the mortgage is paid and love sometimes looks like staying, this is a great pick. It’s ‘The September House’ from Carissa Orlando.
Melissa: My next recommendation is ‘Cackle’ by Rachel Harrison. This is the perfect book for people who don’t like scary stories, but want to get into the Halloween spirit. It’s a cozy story about witchy friendship in a small town in upstate New York.
Melissa: If the author’s name sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve talked about Rachel Harrison before. She’s my favorite author to read during Spooky Season. Her specialty is weaving a dark humor and girl power into traditional horror tropes. Her books are generally not too scary, although some have more bite than others. Her werewolf story ‘Such Sharp Teeth’ is a rom-com/classic monster mashup. ‘Black Sheep’ is a comedy-horror about a girl named Vesper who learns her dad is even worse than she thought. ‘So Thirsty’ is a sharp take on friendship and vampires. And her new one, ‘Play Nice’, is a blend of Amityville Horror and one of those Hallmark movies about a city girl returning to her hometown. She’s also got a short story collection called ‘Bad Dolls’ that I found the creepiest. I’ve loved all of them.
Melissa: But! If you’re craving the whole pumpkin-spice, flame-colored leaves, hot chocolate with marshmallows, fire in the fireplace kind of fall vibes, this is the book for you. As you might guess from the title, we’re hanging out with witches.
Melissa: Our heroine Annie has a broken heart. She’s been dumped by her long-term boyfriend Sam. They live in Manhattan and continue to share their apartment while she figures out what to do with her life. To give you a sense of how lousy that is: Sam decided the best arrangement was for them to alternate bed and futon, so they rotate where they sleep. On Annie’s birthday, it’s her turn for the futon in the living room. Sam has left her a single cupcake and a birthday card with a TRex wearing a party hat. It says, ‘Hope your birthday is dino-might.’
Melissa: Needing an affordable place to live and a change of scenery, Annie takes a job teaching in a small town in upstate New York. It is the very ideal of picturesque small town. Her apartment is in a white house with flower boxes and a tidy green lawn. Main Street is lined with Victorian cast-iron lampposts with hanging flower pots. The cheery shops look like gingerbread houses transplanted from Europe. There’s a pond and a retro train car diner and a stone church with a steeple. It’s almost too perfect.
Melissa: Annie’s first day teaching English at the high school is tough. Her students range from disinterested to openly hostile. So on her drive home, she stops at Simple Spirits, Wine & Liquor. That’s where she meets Sophie. The beautiful, poised, somewhat inscrutable Sophie. Sophie has hair that cascades in shiny waves to her waist. Almond-shaped hazel eyes. Long black eyelashes and eyebrows with steep arches. She wears a long black silky dress and somehow, the creaky floorboards don’t creak when she walks over them. Her voice is like smoke.
Melissa: We know immediately, of course, that she’s a witch. Annie — distracted, sweaty, intimidated, and slightly smitten — does not.
Melissa: Sophie takes Annie on as a sort of project. She introduces Annie to the townsfolk. She takes her to the diner for pancakes with strawberries and a side of bacon. She invites Annie to her house to bake a blackberry pie. A house they get to, BTW, by walking through the woods past an old moss-covered stone well, a circle of lichen-covered headstones, and a crumbling hut with a thatched roof. All of which Annie notices and Sophie dismisses with a shrug.
Melissa: As Annie settles into her new life, and her friendship with Sophie deepens, mysterious things begin to happen around her.
Melissa: There are some VERY entertaining hauntings that are, like, the scariness level of the movie Beetlejuice. There’s also an adorable sentient spider named Ralph and homemade tonics and teas and candles. The further Annie moves away from the old version of herself — the in-a-relationship, people-pleasing parts of herself — the more she questions who she is… and what Sophie might be.
Melissa: A lot of the fun of this story is waiting for Annie to catch up to what we know: Sophie is clearly a witch.
Melissa: Rachel Harrison is very good at dialogue. Her characters always sound like real people, and this book is no exception. Sophie and Annie have heartfelt conversations about what it’s like to be a woman and how we’re supposed to feel about romance — or the lack thereof. They spend hours watching reality TV together, drinking fancy coffees and baking: lemon cake, potatoes with cheese, caramel apples, shortbread cookies, pizza.
Melissa: This is a cozy coming-of-age story with a lot of hocus-pocus and a really nice ending. Read it while nibbling on pumpkin cake or caramel popcorn. It’s Cackle by Rachel Harrison.
David: My second book is ‘Bat Eater and other names for Cora Zeng’ by Kylie Lee Baker.
David: Let’s start here. This book is not for everybody. I can not stress that enough. This is the darkest book we’ve ever talked about. But that might be a strength here? It’s brutal and gory, but it’s also a remarkable story about grief and recovery from the perspective of an Asian woman in New York during the pandemic. If that sounds like something you might read, it’s an extraordinary book.
David: The quick setup is this. A Chinese American crime-scene cleaner in pandemic-era NYC is haunted by her sister’s death, hungry ghosts with some very specific demands, and the possibility that a serial killer is targeting women like her.
David: We start in April 2020 in the East Broadway subway station, during that weird quiet time where nobody knew what was going on. Two sisters — Cora and Delilah — are waiting for a train. And for just a minute, we get the quiet of lockdown and the little bit about the toilet paper shortage. Then a stranger walks by. He says, ‘Bat eater,’ and he shoves Delilah into an oncoming train.
David: As a reader, you are not spared anything about how horrible this would be – both the physical act, and its repercussions, and, through the book, the ongoing grief and guilt and fear and anger.
David: This moment is given its full weight.
David: This book shows you something terrible, then pulls up a chair and says, ‘Okay, let’s be honest about how scary this is.’
David: Chapter two skips ahead a few months. Cora has landed a job with a Chinatown dry cleaner that has pivoted, during lockdown, to crime-scene cleanup. Cora doesn’t mind the work. It gives her some control in a world that is not under control. She finds a strange peace in the protection of the hazmat suit. And it throws her together with two coworkers who will, whether she likes it or not, become a little crew. One talks too much, the other almost not at all. Both of them know how to keep a secret.
David: Together this team is cleaning up a bathroom — a female Asian American doctor has died — when they find a dead bat in the shower drain. And Cora starts counting: how many of our recent jobs have involved Asian women?
David: That’s one thread in this book. The other is that Cora’s sister, Delilah, comes back. In Cora’s family, the Hungry Ghost Festival is not just a date on the lunar calendar; there are rules about this kind of thing. You burn joss paper so your dead won’t go without; you don’t whistle at night; you don’t leave your chopsticks stuck upright in a bowl. And in this apartment—with its sticky radiator, its bad corners—Delilah returns. She doesn’t come back alone. And this is all written very with a lot of veracity. The ancient Chinese lore plays out against fluorescent lights. It’s sometimes funny — there’s an aunt with strong ideas about how the dead should be treated — and then sometimes it isn’t funny at all.
David: The author Kylie Lee Baker does a fantastic job of playing these threads against one another. You’ve got this splatter horror, but there’s also the practical work of cleaning it up. New York City feels predatory to Cora, before and after there’s a hunter in it. The grief comes back as it would in life: sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes with a thought that the dead could have been a better sister, sometimes with anger. The ghosts feel like the embodiment of larger problems — misogyny, racism, failing institutions — without the book ever turning into a sermon. This is a possession story. What possesses you after a loss, and what it takes to walk away from that, and what never leaves. The ending is amazing.
David: I love Cora, the main character. She’s abrasive, anxious, and painfully self-aware. It all seems to happen inside. And Baker lets her be contradictory. She doesn’t “believe,” and yet she washes her hands twice with mechanic soap and organizes her life around invisible rules. She resists ritual until ritual is the only thing that makes sense. There’s a running motif of cleaning — of surfaces, of memory, of guilt — that the book keeps looking at. And her relationships are great. The coworkers become a trio that I rooted for; there’s an aunt who weaponizes dumplings and ghost etiquette; and the sister bond refuses to collapse. It just gets richer as the novel goes along.
David: Again, not for everybody. This book has real-world violence (especially against Asian women), graphic on-page gore, and frank depictions of trauma. That said, it’s also—maybe surprisingly—a book about care: the ways we try to clean what can’t be cleaned, the found families we build, the stubbornness of hope in a city that sometimes feels like it will eat you.
David: If you like what I’ve been talking about, put this at the top of your stack. It’s so good. I tore through it. This is ‘Bat Eater and other names for Cora Zeng’ by Kylie Lee Baker.
Melissa: My final recommendation is Diavola by Jennifer Thorne. This is my favorite ghost story EVER. The horrors it explores are two-fold: legitimately unsettling supernatural experiences AND simmering, seething dysfunctional family drama.
Melissa: Every year, the Pace family takes a group trip together. This year, it’s a 9-day vacation in a luxury rental villa in Tuscany: the 600-year-old Villa Taccola [tackola]. It’s exactly what you’d want in an Italian vacation home. Warm brown stone with terra-cotta tiles om the roof, a Renaissance tower to add a little romance, and in the garden, a sparkling blue pool.
Melissa: Our 30-something heroine Anna is an artist and has complicated feelings about this trip. On one hand, a villa outside the tiny town of Monteperso. She can practice speaking Italian and draw the beautiful things she sees around her.
Melissa: On the other hand, her family.
Melissa: Her twin brother Benny, usually her only ally, is bringing his new boyfriend. Her sister, always annoying, will be accompanied by her two daughters and her bland husband. And then there’s dad — super checked-out — and mom — chilly and judgmental.
Melissa: The first lines of the book tells you exactly what you need to know about Anna and her relationship with her family. ‘Anna kicked off the annual Pace family vacation with a lie. It was the only smart move, and she didn’t feel the least bit guilty about it.’
Melissa: Everyone else is arriving on Friday but Anna has invented a client meeting that will keep her busy until Saturday. But what she really does is fly into Florence alone on Thursday to drink wine on the hotel balcony, stroll the sun-drenched streets, and visit the Uffizi Gallery. Molto bene.
Melissa: On her Uber ride from the train station to the villa, we get the first tickle of something sinister. The mustachioed driver says to her, ‘You sure you want to go to Villa Taccola? I could take you… anywhere else.’
Melissa: The family reunion around the backyard pool does nothing to alleviate the mood. Anna is greeted with cheek air kisses, and her sister’s sharp comments make Anna’s childlessness seem like a luxury and a character flaw at the same time. Anna’s twin brother and the new boyfriend have absconded to Pisa which gives the rest of them liberty to mock him. How he informed the family he’s Christopher. Not Chris. Full name always. Christopher. They’re catty and judgy and unwelcoming. And you know this is a replay of the kind of interactions they’ve had for decades. As Anna goes into the house to change into a bathing suit, she hears her mom say, ‘This is so nice. Everybody together.’
Melissa: Their dinner together that night is no better. The sister insists on cooking while radiating the air of the put-upon. The book says, ‘Nicole had cooked an enormous pot of pasta with fresh ingredients from the local outdoor market and still somehow made it taste like an American TV dinner.’ [DAVE] The new boyfriend, Christopher never Chris, announces he’s keto and will not be breaking his carb fast, Italy be damned. They all give Anna a hard time for her perfect Italian pronunciation, as though her ability to speak Italian is somehow an insult to them.
Melissa: It’s all cringy and perfect — and is replayed — same song, different tune — throughout the trip.
Melissa: I’m focusing on the family dynamics because I don’t want to ruin the dark exhilaration of the ghosty stuff. But the haunting part of the story is luscious. It starts with a prickle of apprehension. The caretaker has warned them not to enter the villa’s tower, despite giving them the ornate key to its door. Chekov’s key!
Melissa: One night, Anna hears rustling outside and spies on a group of men from the village pouring a perimeter of salt around the Villa. She has ghostly visions but convinces herself they’re just dreams.
Melissa: Then it escalates. Doors slam. Furniture re-arranges itself. The bookshelves are emptied, the books stacked in neat piles on the floor. Wine bottles smash on the kitchen tile.
Melissa: To tell you any more about the plot would be unkind — you deserve to experience it yourself.
Melissa: But I will say that Jennifer Thorne is a fantastic writer — and I hope she didn’t come by her deep understanding of messed-up families through personal experience. The words she puts in the mouths of her characters are pitch perfect. And she makes the ephemeral hauntings feel tangible — even when the characters are experiencing things that rationally cannot happen, I could see the events very clearly in my imagination. She also somehow pulls off jump-scares on the page. It’s amazing — and it. was. scary.
Melissa: Also, this seems like a weird thing to say about a horror story, but her descriptions of Italy — the countryside, the village restaurant, a winery, the weather — are beautifully written. Here, have a nice side of travelogue while I scare the pants off you.
Melissa: This is a propulsive ghost story, and a love letter to all the black sheep and scapegoats out there. If you enjoy a shiver up the back of your neck and are here for harrowing family drama, you will love this book. It’s Diavola by Jennifer Thorne.
David: Those are five books we love that celebrate Halloween. If you’ve got a scary book you want to talk about, come tell us about it on Patreon. After every episode, a bunch of curious readers and travelers—just like you—gather to share what we missed and tell a few stories of their own. You can join us for just $3 a month, and you’ll be helping keep the journey going. We’d love to have you along for the adventure.
David: Come by and check out our show notes at strongsenseofplace.com. We’ve got Broadway dancers doing the Thriller zombie dance on 6th avenue. We’ll point you to some of the best places in the world to celebrate Halloween.
David: Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you soon.
[cheerful music]
Top image courtesy of Eleni Petrounakou/Unsplash.
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