#appalachia — Public Fediverse posts

very fascinating episode from the #SmallTownMonsters team who are in #appalachia where the locals tell their #strange & terrifying experiences in the woods.
they then discuss & analyse their perspectives which is how all #science should be done. #WildMen #FeralPeople #Bigfoot #disappearances #Sasquatch

https://youtu.be/eCXWlsWD_bA?

#press #IndependentMedia #IndependentScience #nature #anthropology

very fascinating episode from the #SmallTownMonsters team who are in #appalachia where the locals tell their #strange & terrifying experiences in the woods.
they then discuss & analyse their perspectives which is how all #science should be done. #WildMen #FeralPeople #Bigfoot #disappearances #Sasquatch

https://youtu.be/eCXWlsWD_bA?

#press #IndependentMedia #IndependentScience #nature #anthropology

very fascinating episode from the #SmallTownMonsters team who are in #appalachia where the locals tell their #strange & terrifying experiences in the woods.
they then discuss & analyse their perspectives which is how all #science should be done. #WildMen #FeralPeople #Bigfoot #disappearances #Sasquatch

https://youtu.be/eCXWlsWD_bA?

#press #IndependentMedia #IndependentScience #nature #anthropology

very fascinating episode from the #SmallTownMonsters team who are in #appalachia where the locals tell their #strange & terrifying experiences in the woods.
they then discuss & analyse their perspectives which is how all #science should be done. #WildMen #FeralPeople #Bigfoot #disappearances #Sasquatch

https://youtu.be/eCXWlsWD_bA?

#press #IndependentMedia #IndependentScience #nature #anthropology

Poetry in Crannóg Magazine Now Available

My poem “Weathering” is in Crannóg Magazine‘s Issue 64. The print version is available in bookshops all across Ireland (incl. The Winding Stair and Dubray Books in Dublin and Charlie Byrnes in Galway); Foyle’s in London; City Lights in San Francisco; and Harvard’s bookstore in Cambridge. Full list of stockists here. It can also be ordered online.

Poetry in Crannóg Magazine Now Available

My poem “Weathering” is in Crannóg Magazine‘s Issue 64. The print version is available in bookshops all across Ireland (incl. The Winding Stair and Dubray Books in Dublin and Charlie Byrnes in Galway); Foyle’s in London; City Lights in San Francisco; and Harvard’s bookstore in Cambridge. Full list of stockists here. It can also be ordered online.

One month to Godfestation, my most personal work, and one of my spookiest and most dreamlike! Preorder from your favorite bookseller.
#books #horror #fantasy #appalachia #gothic #folkhorror

One month to Godfestation, my most personal work, and one of my spookiest and most dreamlike! Preorder from your favorite bookseller.
#books #horror #fantasy #appalachia #gothic #folkhorror

Hype for the Future 240B: State Parks with Historic Sites in West Virginia

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/28/hype-for-the-future-240b-state-parks-with-historic-sites-in-west-virginia/

Hype for the Future 240B: State Parks with Historic Sites in West Virginia

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/28/hype-for-the-future-240b-state-parks-with-historic-sites-in-west-virginia/

Hype for the Future 240A: State Park Lodges in West Virginia

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/28/hype-for-the-future-240a-state-park-lodges-in-west-virginia/

Hype for the Future 240A: State Park Lodges in West Virginia

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/28/hype-for-the-future-240a-state-park-lodges-in-west-virginia/

#SilentSunday #Appalachia #Cemetery #Tombstone #Georgia #FamilyHistory #Genealogy

#SilentSunday #Appalachia #Cemetery #Tombstone #Georgia #FamilyHistory #Genealogy

#SilentSunday #Appalachia #Cemetery #Tombstone #Georgia #FamilyHistory #Genealogy

#SilentSunday #Appalachia #Cemetery #Tombstone #Georgia #FamilyHistory #Genealogy

#SilentSunday #Appalachia #Cemetery #Tombstone #Georgia #FamilyHistory #Genealogy

Visiting my favorite stone angel today at the local cemetery. I am trying to capture her in all four seasons.

This is part of a photo challenge for #WikiTree : Hometown Time Capsule for America's 250th Anniversary.

We are trying to get a photo for every State and can use your help.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:America%27s_250th_Hometown_Time_Capsule

#cemetery #angel #georgia #appalachia #tombstone

Visiting my favorite stone angel today at the local cemetery. I am trying to capture her in all four seasons.

This is part of a photo challenge for #WikiTree : Hometown Time Capsule for America's 250th Anniversary.

We are trying to get a photo for every State and can use your help.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:America%27s_250th_Hometown_Time_Capsule

#cemetery #angel #georgia #appalachia #tombstone

Visiting my favorite stone angel today at the local cemetery. I am trying to capture her in all four seasons.

This is part of a photo challenge for #WikiTree : Hometown Time Capsule for America's 250th Anniversary.

We are trying to get a photo for every State and can use your help.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:America%27s_250th_Hometown_Time_Capsule

#cemetery #angel #georgia #appalachia #tombstone

Visiting my favorite stone angel today at the local cemetery. I am trying to capture her in all four seasons.

This is part of a photo challenge for #WikiTree : Hometown Time Capsule for America's 250th Anniversary.

We are trying to get a photo for every State and can use your help.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:America%27s_250th_Hometown_Time_Capsule

#cemetery #angel #georgia #appalachia #tombstone

Visiting my favorite stone angel today at the local cemetery. I am trying to capture her in all four seasons.

This is part of a photo challenge for #WikiTree : Hometown Time Capsule for America's 250th Anniversary.

We are trying to get a photo for every State and can use your help.

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:America%27s_250th_Hometown_Time_Capsule

#cemetery #angel #georgia #appalachia #tombstone

Hype for the Future 235Q: Cambridge, Ohio

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/23/hype-for-the-future-235q-cambridge-ohio/

Hype for the Future 235Q: Cambridge, Ohio

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/23/hype-for-the-future-235q-cambridge-ohio/

Hype for the Future 235P: Zanesville, Ohio

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/23/hype-for-the-future-235p-zanesville-ohio/

Hype for the Future 235P: Zanesville, Ohio

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/23/hype-for-the-future-235p-zanesville-ohio/

Hype for the Future 235K: Harrison County, Ohio

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/23/hype-for-the-future-235k-harrison-county-ohio/

Hype for the Future 235K: Harrison County, Ohio

https://novatopflex.wordpress.com/2026/06/23/hype-for-the-future-235k-harrison-county-ohio/

Finished writing. Now everything else. Sometime this summer, this book will come out. It moves at its own pace. Not the cover, btw. #books #bookstodon #booksky #book #bookTok #crimeFiction #novel #novels #fun #cover #mastodon #mysteryThriller #mystery #writing #writers #writtenWorks #MyWork #work #teaser #SelfPromo #promo #writersCoffeeClub #writersofMastodon #appalachia #rural #storytelling #storytelling #thriller #scribesAndMakers

Finished writing. Now everything else. Sometime this summer, this book will come out. It moves at its own pace. Not the cover, btw. #books #bookstodon #booksky #book #bookTok #crimeFiction #novel #novels #fun #cover #mastodon #mysteryThriller #mystery #writing #writers #writtenWorks #MyWork #work #teaser #SelfPromo #promo #writersCoffeeClub #writersofMastodon #appalachia #rural #storytelling #storytelling #thriller #scribesAndMakers

Loophole in Endangered Species Act Is Closed to Coal Miners After Court Ruling

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/loophole-through-endangered-species-act-protections-closed-for-coal-miners-after-court-ruling/

Loophole in Endangered Species Act Is Closed to Coal Miners After Court Ruling

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/loophole-through-endangered-species-act-protections-closed-for-coal-miners-after-court-ruling/

Happy Birthday to the Person Who Lived It All With Me- My Brother, Charles Allen Miracle

https://lauraleacupp.wordpress.com/2026/05/29/happy-birthday-to-the-person-who-lived-it-all-with-me-my-brother-charles-allen-miracle/

Happy Birthday to the Person Who Lived It All With Me- My Brother, Charles Allen Miracle

https://lauraleacupp.wordpress.com/2026/05/29/happy-birthday-to-the-person-who-lived-it-all-with-me-my-brother-charles-allen-miracle/

Happy Birthday to the Person Who Lived It All With Me- My Brother, Charles Allen Miracle

https://lauraleacupp.wordpress.com/2026/05/29/happy-birthday-to-the-person-who-lived-it-all-with-me-my-brother-charles-allen-miracle/

Happy Birthday to the Person Who Lived It All With Me- My Brother, Charles Allen Miracle

https://lauraleacupp.wordpress.com/2026/05/29/happy-birthday-to-the-person-who-lived-it-all-with-me-my-brother-charles-allen-miracle/

Happy Birthday to the Person Who Lived It All With Me- My Brother, Charles Allen Miracle

https://lauraleacupp.wordpress.com/2026/05/29/happy-birthday-to-the-person-who-lived-it-all-with-me-my-brother-charles-allen-miracle/

#MemorialDay #Appalachia #Georgia #Cemetery #Tombstone #Genealogy

Ever wonder what the symbols are on US #Military Tombstones? https://www.cem.va.gov/hmm/emblems.asp

#MemorialDay #Appalachia #Georgia #Cemetery #Tombstone #Genealogy

Ever wonder what the symbols are on US #Military Tombstones? https://www.cem.va.gov/hmm/emblems.asp

#MemorialDay #Appalachia #Georgia #Cemetery #Tombstone #Genealogy

Ever wonder what the symbols are on US #Military Tombstones? https://www.cem.va.gov/hmm/emblems.asp

#MemorialDay #Appalachia #Georgia #Cemetery #Tombstone #Genealogy

Ever wonder what the symbols are on US #Military Tombstones? https://www.cem.va.gov/hmm/emblems.asp

#MemorialDay #Appalachia #Georgia #Cemetery #Tombstone #Genealogy

Ever wonder what the symbols are on US #Military Tombstones? https://www.cem.va.gov/hmm/emblems.asp

Fairies, folk healers, and the problem of the “witch”

I’ve recently been reading Ann Jefferies and the Fairies: A Source Book for a Seventeenth-Century Fairy Witch, published a few years ago by folklore researcher Simon Young. The book collects documents about the Cornish fairy seer Ann Jefferies, who claimed to have received healing powers from little men and women clad in green whom she called “fairies.” 

One thing that struck me while reading the book is how strongly Ann herself would have rejected the label “witch”—something that Young readily admits. Like many folk healers and fairy seers in places as far removed as England and Appalachia, Ann considered her powers to be spiritually legitimate—even Christian.

The distinction between healer and witch was particularly important for people like Ann in the seventeenth century. The mid-1600s were possibly the most dangerous time for someone who claimed supernatural powers: not only was the witch hysteria still alive—which meant that consorting with fairies might lead someone to be branded a witch—the Puritans were in the ascendancy, and Ann, a royalist, was considered extra suspect because she prophesied a miraculous return of the King (whom the Puritans had recently imprisoned). When she was asked to tell her story in the 1690s, the situation had evidently changed: although she remained scared of the authorities, interest in prosecuting folk healers or fairy seers as “witches” had apparently waned. (Even someone as committed to Christianity as the Bishop of Gloucester now sympathized with Ann’s story.) This suggests that the automatic identification of “fairy healing” with witchcraft had also weakened considerably, and fairy familiars were no longer assumed to be diabolical. 

The book got me thinking a lot about folk healers and fairy seers in the geography I deal with, especially New England and Appalachia. Like Ann, these healers and seers would also have objected to the witch label. While folk healing thrived in both locations, and the tradition of special people gaining power from the fairies appeared intermittently, these healers and seers never identified as witches and often understood their work as combating witchcraft. These traditions surfaced in various forms in North America: In folktales from Pennsylvania Dutch Country, we find a hunter who learned perfect hunting ability from a “little gray man” in the Blue Mountains; a healer who practiced white magic that he learned from an “old gray man” in the Netherlands; and a herbalist who claimed to have observed a mysterious forest dwarf deep in the woods of Berks County.

In New England, we find that the fairies sometimes bestowed knowledge of the future on their favored people, just as they did on Ann. But this had nothing to do with witchcraft: I recently met a woman in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, whose Irish great-grandmother (called Mary Sullivan) claimed that “a banshee” had told her that a family member was about to die, suggesting that some New Englanders viewed the fairies as a source of hidden knowledge. In Southern Appalachia, folk healing sometimes intersected with older fairy traditions, even when people no longer openly believed in fairies as a coherent supernatural race, but such practices were clearly differentiated from witchcraft. These people most likely saw their skills as an attempt to counter the negative influence of witches.

The one folktale I’ve come across in Appalachia where an ambiguous attitude toward witchcraft exists is “The Witchie Folk.” Originating in Scotland, this tale was collected in Pennsylvania but apparently took root originally in West Virginia. In this story, we find a fairylike community of “witchie” people who are first looked at with suspicion but are later embraced as sympathetic beings. Deriving their power from the moon, the witchie folk apparently represent a memory of the old Scottish openness toward fairies that once existed in early-modern Scottish folklore, something I discuss in greater detail in my book. The story also suggests that at least some Appalachians understood that the distinction between witches and folk healers could become slippery. Perhaps some people really did believe that the only effective defense against witchcraft was accessing the same powers feared in witches themselves.

Rather than identifying as witches, most folk healers and seers like Ann—in Appalachia and England—identified as Christian and even performed their healings in the “name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” Ann’s fairies justified their bestowal of special powers by referring to the scriptures. Where fairy traditions existed explicitly in Appalachia—such as in the tradition of naming staurolite crystals in Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina “fairy stones”—these traditions had to be “Christened,” in this case by inventing a legend that would sanctify the naming tradition and turn the fairies, ostensibly, into “Christians.” Many of these themes—Christian fairy belief, folk healing, banshees, fairy stones, and the uneasy boundary between healing and witchcraft—are explored in my forthcoming book, Fairies of Northern Appalachia. There I trace how older fairy traditions survived, adapted, and sometimes disguised themselves in the mountains and borderlands of eastern North America.

Fairies, folk healers, and the problem of the “witch”

I’ve recently been reading Ann Jefferies and the Fairies: A Source Book for a Seventeenth-Century Fairy Witch, published a few years ago by folklore researcher Simon Young. The book collects documents about the Cornish fairy seer Ann Jefferies, who claimed to have received healing powers from little men and women clad in green whom she called “fairies.” 

One thing that struck me while reading the book is how strongly Ann herself would have rejected the label “witch”—something that Young readily admits. Like many folk healers and fairy seers in places as far removed as England and Appalachia, Ann considered her powers to be spiritually legitimate—even Christian.

The distinction between healer and witch was particularly important for people like Ann in the seventeenth century. The mid-1600s were possibly the most dangerous time for someone who claimed supernatural powers: not only was the witch hysteria still alive—which meant that consorting with fairies might lead someone to be branded a witch—the Puritans were in the ascendancy, and Ann, a royalist, was considered extra suspect because she prophesied a miraculous return of the King (whom the Puritans had recently imprisoned). When she was asked to tell her story in the 1690s, the situation had evidently changed: although she remained scared of the authorities, interest in prosecuting folk healers or fairy seers as “witches” had apparently waned. (Even someone as committed to Christianity as the Bishop of Gloucester now sympathized with Ann’s story.) This suggests that the automatic identification of “fairy healing” with witchcraft had also weakened considerably, and fairy familiars were no longer assumed to be diabolical. 

The book got me thinking a lot about folk healers and fairy seers in the geography I deal with, especially New England and Appalachia. Like Ann, these healers and seers would also have objected to the witch label. While folk healing thrived in both locations, and the tradition of special people gaining power from the fairies appeared intermittently, these healers and seers never identified as witches and often understood their work as combating witchcraft. These traditions surfaced in various forms in North America: In folktales from Pennsylvania Dutch Country, we find a hunter who learned perfect hunting ability from a “little gray man” in the Blue Mountains; a healer who practiced white magic that he learned from an “old gray man” in the Netherlands; and a herbalist who claimed to have observed a mysterious forest dwarf deep in the woods of Berks County.

In New England, we find that the fairies sometimes bestowed knowledge of the future on their favored people, just as they did on Ann. But this had nothing to do with witchcraft: I recently met a woman in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, whose Irish great-grandmother (called Mary Sullivan) claimed that “a banshee” had told her that a family member was about to die, suggesting that some New Englanders viewed the fairies as a source of hidden knowledge. In Southern Appalachia, folk healing sometimes intersected with older fairy traditions, even when people no longer openly believed in fairies as a coherent supernatural race. But such practices were clearly differentiated from witchcraft. These people most likely saw their skills as an attempt to counter the negative influence of witches.

The one folktale I’ve come across in Appalachia where an ambiguous attitude toward witchcraft exists is “The Witchie Folk.” Originating in Scotland, this tale was collected in Pennsylvania but apparently took root originally in West Virginia. In this story, we find a fairylike community of “witchie” people who are first looked at with suspicion but are later embraced as sympathetic beings. Deriving their power from the moon, the witchie folk apparently represent a memory of the old Scottish openness toward fairies that once existed in early-modern Scottish folklore, something I discuss in greater detail in my book. The story also suggests that at least some Appalachians understood that the distinction between witches and folk healers could become slippery. Perhaps some people really did believe that the only effective defense against witchcraft was accessing the same powers feared in witches themselves.

Rather than identifying as witches, most folk healers and seers like Ann—in Appalachia and England—identified as Christian and even performed their healings in the “name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” Ann’s fairies justified their bestowal of special powers by referring to the scriptures. Where fairy traditions existed explicitly in Appalachia—such as in the tradition of naming staurolite crystals in Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina “fairy stones”—these traditions had to be “Christened,” in this case by inventing a legend that would sanctify the naming tradition and turn the fairies, ostensibly, into “Christians.” Many of these themes—Christian fairy belief, folk healing, banshees, fairy stones, and the uneasy boundary between healing and witchcraft—are explored in my forthcoming book, Fairies of Northern Appalachia. There I trace how older fairy traditions survived, adapted, and sometimes disguised themselves in the mountains and borderlands of eastern North America.

#miners #Appalachia #coverups #WestVirginia #silicosis #history

"America’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster And the Cover-Up That Erased It from History

The men came to West Virginia wanting nothing more than honest work. Instead, they faced a silent killer.

(. . .)

According to Union Carbide’s own records, of the 1,500 men who worked exclusively inside the tunnel during its construction, 1,115 were Black, and almost none were from the local area.

Awaiting them in the tunnel’s path: thousands of feet of solid rock that, when blasted and drilled and chiseled and shoveled, transformed into tiny, glass-like particles that sliced a million little cuts into your lung tissue until slowly, slowly, slowly, over years even, you died.

(. . .)

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) notes that respirable crystalline silica, created 'when cutting, sawing, grinding, drilling, and crushing stone [or] rock,' is made up of particles 100 times smaller than a grain of sand, and that anyone who inhales it is at a higher risk of developing a horrific, irreversible, and incurable disease called silicosis. OSHA wasn’t established until 1970, but these facts were well-known by the time the Hawk’s Nest project was underway, and engineers and executives at Union Carbide would have been aware of the risk.

(. . .)

He reconstructed all of it, and it is all chilling, and the most chilling parts of the book are the descriptions of life for the tunnel workers. The discrepancies between the living conditions of Black and white workers are particularly striking: Laborers lived in two-room shanties, with two bunk beds in each room. Black workers slept eight to 12 in a shanty; whites just four. Black shanties had no electricity, while those housing the white workers did.

Never did the company that Union Carbide had formed to oversee the project, the New Kanawha Power Company, measure dust levels in the tunnel, which would have been a common practice even then."

https://archive.ph/MgtxC

#miners #Appalachia #coverups #WestVirginia #silicosis #history

"America’s Deadliest Industrial Disaster And the Cover-Up That Erased It from History

The men came to West Virginia wanting nothing more than honest work. Instead, they faced a silent killer.

(. . .)

According to Union Carbide’s own records, of the 1,500 men who worked exclusively inside the tunnel during its construction, 1,115 were Black, and almost none were from the local area.

Awaiting them in the tunnel’s path: thousands of feet of solid rock that, when blasted and drilled and chiseled and shoveled, transformed into tiny, glass-like particles that sliced a million little cuts into your lung tissue until slowly, slowly, slowly, over years even, you died.

(. . .)

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) notes that respirable crystalline silica, created 'when cutting, sawing, grinding, drilling, and crushing stone [or] rock,' is made up of particles 100 times smaller than a grain of sand, and that anyone who inhales it is at a higher risk of developing a horrific, irreversible, and incurable disease called silicosis. OSHA wasn’t established until 1970, but these facts were well-known by the time the Hawk’s Nest project was underway, and engineers and executives at Union Carbide would have been aware of the risk.

(. . .)

He reconstructed all of it, and it is all chilling, and the most chilling parts of the book are the descriptions of life for the tunnel workers. The discrepancies between the living conditions of Black and white workers are particularly striking: Laborers lived in two-room shanties, with two bunk beds in each room. Black workers slept eight to 12 in a shanty; whites just four. Black shanties had no electricity, while those housing the white workers did.

Never did the company that Union Carbide had formed to oversee the project, the New Kanawha Power Company, measure dust levels in the tunnel, which would have been a common practice even then."

https://archive.ph/MgtxC

"While the Trump administration is directing hundreds of millions of dollars to coal projects, miners in Appalachia are suffering from a resurgence of black lung disease. But industry pushback is delaying federal rules that would reduce miners’ exposure to deadly silica dust."

#BlackLung #CoalMining #SilicaDust #Appalachia #MiningReform #PublicHealth #CoalIndustry #Trump

https://e360.yale.edu/features/black-lung-pennsylvania

"While the Trump administration is directing hundreds of millions of dollars to coal projects, miners in Appalachia are suffering from a resurgence of black lung disease. But industry pushback is delaying federal rules that would reduce miners’ exposure to deadly silica dust."

#BlackLung #CoalMining #SilicaDust #Appalachia #MiningReform #PublicHealth #CoalIndustry #Trump

https://e360.yale.edu/features/black-lung-pennsylvania

After almost a year from buying a place in the #BlueRidgeMountains, we finally had a #datenight. I promise you that there is nothing like living in a small town and supporting small business owners. 🏡

Living slow, dining local, and drinking something strong (yes, #moonshine) under #Appalachian skies. Around here, the sunsets stop traffic, everybody knows your name, and the stories get better after dark. Small town life may not move fast but it sure knows how to live. I am so fortunate. The sunsets are pretty fabulous too!

Also, how cool is it that I'm standing in the middle of the road to take this picture. 😁

#Appalachia #Sunsets #SmallTown #Georgia

After almost a year from buying a place in the #BlueRidgeMountains, we finally had a #datenight. I promise you that there is nothing like living in a small town and supporting small business owners. 🏡

Living slow, dining local, and drinking something strong (yes, #moonshine) under #Appalachian skies. Around here, the sunsets stop traffic, everybody knows your name, and the stories get better after dark. Small town life may not move fast but it sure knows how to live. I am so fortunate. The sunsets are pretty fabulous too!

Also, how cool is it that I'm standing in the middle of the road to take this picture. 😁

#Appalachia #Sunsets #SmallTown #Georgia