Just realized people in the 1800s wrote wild horror stories from real newspaper articles

I was reading a book about old folklore in New England and found out that a lot of the scary tales from the 1830s were based on actual local crime reports. One example was a story called "The White Thing" that came from a Massachusetts paper about a guy finding a skeleton in his barn. It blew my mind that historical writers just grabbed headlines and turned them into ghost stories without changing much. Has anyone else run across old prompts like that in their research?

2 comments

2 Comments

kevin_murray883d ago

Honestly, there's a specific case from 1844 in upstate New York where a local paper ran a story about a farmer who found a human jawbone in his well. A writer named Lydia Maria Child turned that into a short story about a ghost haunting the well, but she kept the farmer's real name in it. What messed me up is that the guy's actual descendants were still living in that county when the story got published. Ngl, that's way darker than any modern "based on a true story" tag.

max3882d ago

Whoa, hold up, I'm pretty sure the Lydia Maria Child story you're thinking of is actually from 1838, not 1844. She wrote a piece called "The Well of the Spectre" for the Lowell Offering, based on that same farmer finding a jawbone in his well in upstate New York. The dates might be a little fuzzy since it's old news, but the creepy part about the descendants being local when it ran is still true. Just wanted to clear that up since those old papers are tricky to pin down.