Drawn from the oral traditions of American folklore, these ghost stories and tales of weird happenings, witches, and graveyards have startling, funny, or surprising endings

Retells the life of the legendary African American hero who raced against a steam drill to cut through a mountain.

More traditional and modern-day stories of ghosts, witches, vampires, ""jump"" stories, and scary songs.

Recounts the life of the extraordinary lumberjack whose unusual size and strength brought him many fantastic adventures.

A retelling of the Afro-American tales about the adventures and misadventures of Brer Rabbit and his friends and enemies.

When cornmeal is stolen from an elderly couple, the others in a Cherokee village find a way to drive off the thief, creating the Milky Way in the process.

The folklore surrounding history's towering figures often overshadows actual scholarship, both in terms of quantity and in terms of prevalence in the public consciousness. As one might expect with a revered national icon, nearly every facet of Abraham Lincoln's life has been subject to mythmaking as well as academic inquiry of widely varying quality and accuracy. In Lincoln Legends, noted historian and Lincoln expert Edward Steers Jr. carefully scrutinizes...

A Southern folktale in which kind Blanche, following the instructions of an old witch, gains riches, while her greedy sister makes fun of the old woman and is duly rewarded.