Book Review: Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers

 By Matthew Sparks (editor), Olivia Sizemore (illustrator)

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Folktales

• Where I bought this book: Joseph-Beth Bookstore, Lexington, during the Kentucky Book Fair 

• Why I bought this book: The authors talked me into it  

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     Just so you know: A haint is sort of like a ghost, likely someone or something that appears where the distance between the supernatural world and our world is thin, meaning spirits sometimes cross over. A booger is cryptid, an animal or person that has grown out of proportion on the other side. Stained earth is a place where something evil happened, and the spirits are restless. High strangeness is just something weird that happened and cannot be easily explained. 

    Haint Country is the Appalachian dialect terms for where all these things occur.

    If you pick up this book -- and you should -- you must read the forward and introduction to these tales. It'll teach you a thing or two and make them a lot more believable to you all.

    I swear to god and hope to die if I'm lyin'.

    Moving on, you'll find this an eclectic collection of tales told mostly in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky, the heart of Appalachian Kentucky, mostly from Lee, Owsley, Clay, Leslie, Perry, and Harlan counties. They have been handed down from family to family, friend to friend, some outright invented, and some recalled to explain a curious sight or occurrence.

      The tales are written -- or told to others over time -- by various authors, some of who are credited with more than one. 

    They have been told after dark on overnight fishing trips, in a school yard to explain why no one goes down that creepy corridor, or to a spouse to excuse lateness or a lack of pants.*

    Some are to remember the victims of the mining disasters that occurred regularly in Kentucky history and still haunt entire communities. Others explain the strange feelings one gets when passing a forgotten cemetery or jailhouse. 

    But some are just old tales told around the campfire when the stars come out and the night gets dark and spooky. The drawbacks with these are they sound like the least likely explanation for a simple event, like why a house brunt down, but the tellers insist that every word is true and verified by anyone with a lick of sense. This is mostly a problem in the second part of the book, when the good ol' boys think of something they saw on television.**

    The tales in the first part of the book seem more like those told and retold as a potentially plausible, maybe if you squint real hard, explanation. Or something told after a bunch of people got together to recollect why the old barn burnt down, and try to outdo each other with wild explanations after too much moonshine.

    The longest story concerns the spooking of a house in Breathitt County, most likely by Mary Jane Fox, who apparently didn't like the changes made -- or the fact that her husband killed her when they lived in the previous house on the site. 

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* See Paw Hensley and the Naked Haint Woman of Squabble Creek, attributed to Hensley Sparks, "a walking, talking tall tale, born and raised in Clay County, Kentucky."

** See The Legend of The John Asher's UFO, (an episode of X-Files, no less) "dedicated to the memory of Patrick Smith, who was also a witness to the events" in the late 1990s or early 2000s.