13 Georgia Ghosts and Jeffrey - Hardcover

Windham, Kathryn Tucker

4.27

77 ratings by Goodreads

9780817318819: 13 Georgia Ghosts and Jeffrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081731881X ISBN 13: 9780817318819

Publisher: The University of Alabama Press, 2015

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13 Georgia Ghosts and Jeffrey is a deluxe, commemorative edition of famed southern author and folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham’s introduction to Georgia’s thirteen most famous haunted houses and ghostly visitations.

Petrifying the peach state, hosts of haints have beset the state of Georgia throughout its storied history. In 13 Georgia Ghosts and Jeffrey, best-selling folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham, along with her trusty spectral companion Jeffrey, introduce thirteen of Georgia’s most famous ghost stories.

Windham won hearts across the nation in her regular radio broadcasts and many public appearances. The South’s most prolific raconteur of rev�enants, Windham, giving new meaning to the phrase “ghost-writer,” does more than tell ghost stories—she captures the true spirit of the place.

Evoking Georgia’s colonial era, “The Eternal Dinner Party” explains why the sounds of an elegant dinner soir�e still waft from the grove of Savan�nah’s Bonaventure estate. At the onset of the Revolution, the Tattnall family abandoned Bonaventure and slipped away to England. Young Josiah Tattnall, after a spell at school, could not reconcile his patriotic feelings for Georgia and his longing for home. Tattnall returned to fight in the Revolution, restored Bonaventure, and eventually became Geor�gia’s governor. One holiday eve, when the mansion was bedecked with magnolia and holly and crowded with visitors, a fire too large to control swept through the old house. Tattnall, exhibiting his cool head and im�peccable manners, ordered the massive dinner table carried out to the garden where he enjoined his holiday revellers to continue their stately meal. The melancholy strains of Tattnall’s dinner guests still echo through Bonaventure’s ancient oaks on moonlight nights.

In “The Ghost of Andersonville,” Windham takes visitors near the woebe�gone Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. A plaque there still recounts the tale of Swiss immigrant and Confederate captain Henry Wirz. Con�victed—many thought wrongly—of war crimes, Wirz’s restless ghosts still perambulates the highways of south Georgia. Writing for the Georgia Historical Commission, Miss Bessie Lewis quipped in her preface to this beloved collection, “...who should be better able to tell of happenings long past than the ghosts of those who had a part in them?”

A perennial favourite, this commemorative edition restores 13 Georgia Ghosts and Jeffrey to the ghastly grandeur of its original 1973 edition.

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Review:

"Ghost stories have a very real place in the folklore and the history of a state or a nation. After all, who should be better able to tell of happenings long past than the ghosts of those who had a part in them?"
--Miss Bessie Lewis, author of They Called Their Town Darien: Being a Short History of Darien and McIntosh County, Georgia

"Spine-tingling with a twang . . ."
--National Public Radio's "All Things Considered"

"In Windham's tales . . . myth and fact intertwine to present a picture of the South that is as true as any textbook."
--Paris Review

About the Author:

Kathryn Tucker Windham grew up in Thomasville, Alabama, USA, the young�est child in a large family of storytellers. For many years a Selma resident, Windham was a freelance writer, collected folklore, and photographed the changing scenes of her native South. A nationally recognized story�teller and a regular fixture on Alabama Public Radio, her commentaries were also featured on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

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