Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Rebecca Turkewitz writes about Here In The Night from Black Lawrence Press.

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I’ve long been fascinated by the myriad ways local lore and ghost stories reflect and reinforce a community’s values and fears. Every time I move to a new place, one of the first things I do is research its hauntings.

This obsession is clearly evident in my debut book, Here in the Night. The stories in the collection often incorporate local legends and ghost stories, though most of the folklore in the book is invented (with two exceptions). As I was writing, I read tons of urban legends and ‘true’ ghost stories in anthologies and online. I talked to people about the hauntings they’d heard about or witnessed. I looked for regional patterns. I considered the types of details these tales usually divulged and the types of details they often left out. Which stories had staying power? Which stories made it just a little harder for me to sleep soundly after I’d read or heard them? I drew inspiration from these folktales, and also gained a stronger understanding of their typical structure, rhythm, and themes.  

This research guided my thinking as I developed the stories in Here in the Night. It was also tremendously fun. Some tales were unsettling, some were grotesque or bizarre, and others were delightfully campy. Here are several of my favorite spooky local legends:

1. Crybaby Bridge: There are dozens of versions of this common Midwestern and Southern ghost story. In all of them, passing motorists hear the sobs of an unseen, long-dead child as they drive over a bridge where some past tragedy occurred. In the version I explore in my story “Crybaby Bridge,” an unwed mother drowned her infant in a fit of shame, heartbreak, insanity, or desperation, similar to the actions of the Mexican specter La Llorona. Read more about Crybaby Bridges here. 
2. The Haunted Elevator of Hopkins Hall: I first learned about the haunted Ohio State elevator from an article in the OSU student newspaper. In this unsettling campus legend, an undergrad becomes stuck in the elevator overnight, has a breakdown, and writes unhinged notes on the walls in her own blood (or in paint, depending on who’s telling the story). Her ghost now haunts the elevator, leaving handprints and scrawling alarming notes on the walls. But in every version I could find, the student is eventually rescued and doesn’t die until years later. This detail intrigued me—why would a spirit haunt a place in which they didn’t live or die. I wrote “The Elevator Girl” to try to answer that question. Read more about OSU’s haunted elevator here. 
3. The Ghost Ship of Maine: In January 1815, a privateering ship named Dash disappeared at sea when a surprise Nor’easter descended on the Maine coast. The ship never made it back to port, but for years the schooner was sighted through fog and mist and storms, speeding towards home. According to the legend, she appears whenever a crewmember’s relative dies to help ferry that person into the world of the dead. Read more about Dash here.
4. The Razorshins of the North Maine Woods: There are many cryptids and monsters said to be lurking in the North Maine Woods. Much of this area’s folklore originates from stories told at logging camp outposts in the 1800s. I love these stories because they are so weird. There’s a cougar-like beast whose tail has a ball on the end of it used to crack people’s skulls. There’s a tiny creature that used to drop poisonous lichen into the eyes of loggers, temporarily blinding them. But my favorite is a humanoid being with razor-sharp shinbones that protrude from its skin. Razorshins used these bones to disfigure loggers who didn’t leave them gifts of liquor. Read more about razorshins here. 
5. In the woods of Ohio, there supposedly lives a strange brood of children with large, misshapen, hairless heads. These “melon heads” were orphans under the care of an enigmatic Dr. Crow, who performed strange experiments on the children. Eventually the children had enough; they burned down the orphanage, killed the doctor, and escaped into the forest. In some especially gruesome versions of this tale, they occasionally slink out of the woods to feed on babies. Read more here.  
6. The Three-Legged Lady of Nash Road: This legend starts off the way many similar folktales do: a woman appears from nowhere on a dark, lonely road. She chases your car. She bangs on your hood. All pretty well-worn territory. But the woman who guards this particular stretch of road in Mississippi has a third leg. And her third leg is actually her dead lover’s rotting limb, which she has sown onto her own body, which is an absolutely wild twist. Read more here. 
7. Black Eyed Kids: This internet-fueled urban legend has popped up all over the country. Children show up at car windows or on doorsteps or emerge from the woods, and their behavior is a little off-kilter, a little cold. Then they turn to look at you and their eyes are completely black, as if their pupils have spilled into the whites. I’ve always found creepy children especially scary, and thoroughly enjoyed reading the numerous accounts of sightings that people shared on Reddit and other sites. Read more here. 

Further Reading: Haunted Heartland by Beth Scott and Michael Norman; Hoosier Folk Legends by Ronald L. Baker; True Irish Ghost Stories by John D. Seymore and Harry L. Neligen; Dark Woods, Chill Waters: Ghost Tales from Downeast Maine by Marcus LiBrizzi; Maine Ghosts & Legends by Thomas Verde; Ghostland: An American History of Haunted Places by Colin Dickey. I also recommend this great Thrillist article on the creepiest urban legend in every state.

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Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and public high school teacher living in Portland, Maine. She is the author of Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press, July 2023), a collection of thirteen spooky literary short stories. Her fiction and humor writing have appeared in The Normal School, Chicago Quarterly Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, SmokeLong Quarterly, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University. You can find her at her at rebeccaturkewitz.com, and on Twitter and Instagram.