There’s another Appalachia beneath the one you think you know.
It lives down forgotten back roads and deep in mountain hollers. It creeps unnoticed inside abandoned houses, slowly surrendering to the forest. It lurks in family stories told so many times that no one remembers where the truth ends and the legend begins.
It comes alive in haints and superstitions, old cemeteries and coal towns, folk remedies and whispered warnings. It thrives in the stories our grandparents told us, and especially in the ones they refused to tell at all.
That’s the Appalachia I explore.
I’m Lenora Bellhurst, The Appalachian G’Author: writer, storyteller, wanderer, and collector of strange things from the mountains I call home.
The Appalachian G’Author began with my love for two things that have shaped nearly everything I write: Gothic storytelling and Appalachia.
But my adventures are about more than ghost stories.
Appalachia is beautiful, complicated, funny, tragic, fiercely independent, deeply rooted, and frequently misunderstood. Its history is filled with remarkable people and peculiar places, old traditions, folklore, music, literature, hardship, resilience—and more than a few things that can’t be easily explained.
On the weekends, I go looking for them.
Here, we’ll wander through Appalachian folklore and forgotten history. We’ll visit haunted places, old towns, historic homes, cemeteries, mountains, caves, and whatever else catches my curiosity. We’ll talk about books and writers, legends and superstitions, true stories and tall tales.
And occasionally, we’ll simply coddiwomple, setting off for an adventure without an exact destination in mind. We’ll wind through backroads, wander abandoned ghost towns, explore haunted places, and visit historical sites.
Some of what I find will inspire my fiction. Some of it will be stranger than anything I could make up.
And some stories?
Well, some stories are safer left right where they’re buried.
— Lenora Bellhurst
The Appalachian G’Author
