Haunted Watauga County, North Carolina

by Tim Bullard

Just as the Blue Ridge Mountains dot the landscape of this famed North Carolina county, so do the spirits of the residents who have long since passed. At the Hickory Ridge Museum, one cabin fills with the scent of pipe tobacco just before its otherworldly resident appears, and the ghost of a hanged Tory captain rides his steed along Riddle's Knob every misty midnight. From the story of the haunted spring near the Watauga River frequented by the ghost of a headless dog to the distant buzz of a phantom airplane flying high above Howard's Knob mountain in Boone, these tales are bound to chill even the bravest of readers. Noted journalist Tim Bullard delves into the eerie past of Watauga County as he recounts the stories of the souls doomed to forever roam the pine-covered hills.

128 pages, Paperback

First published August 23, 2011

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pass

I hate to write bad reviews when someone takes the time to write a book but dang this was bad. No haunts, a few simple things about witches and lots of preaching. Haunted America means scary stories mixed in with history. Don't preach to me about abortion or suicide in a book meant to tell haunted tales.

[Crysti Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up this book because, first, I love good haunted stories. Second, I live in North Carolina so anything haunted in NC seemed like a good read.

Now, this book wasn't bad bad. I would've rated it higher had it been marketed and called a true crime book. Most stories started out with, "X Name is a ghost" then went on for pages about how they died. Could be a ghost. Might not be a ghost. Who knows. {FYI: One of the stories, the one about the Durhams was still unsolved at the time of writing. It was solved a few years ago; just look the story up after reading it to see the conclusion}

There was a lot of repetitive wording in some stories. Some lines were even repeated every other line. By the end of the book I was skip reading the stories.

Wasn't my cup of tea. Some of the stories were good as true crime but other stories were boring no matter what they were marketed as.

[CL · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn’t even finish this garbage. It’s incredibly poorly written and the stories I managed to slog through didn’t have a thing to do with anything haunted - and often only marginally about whatever the first part of the story was about! Complete waste of my time. As a native Wataugan I was excited to learn more about the ghostly history of this beautiful county but this collection of crap is absolutely not the way to do that. I wouldn’t give $1 for it let alone the $20 on the label. I expected more given the “Haunted America” markings but apparently they’ll slap their name on anything these days.

[Kyndall Monroe · Rating 1 out of 5]

God, what a garbage book. The most horrifying thing about this book is the preachiness. One story is about him going to a crime scene where a trucker committing suicide and the author decides this is a good time to talk about how depression doesn't exist, because you could just go outside or get a job and "if you commit suicide, you're going to hell". Also, trigger warning about describing a miscarriage for three pages then talking about how abortion shouldn't be a thing. Woof. Absolutely no stories about actual hauntings. This guy was a journalist? It doesn't read like it was proofread, dude just seems like he got drunk off the holy spirit one night and rambled on for 100 pages.

[Lynn Ewart · Rating 1 out of 5]

If I had read the reviews for this book before buying it, I would never have bought it. I bought it expecting history about ghosts in the area. I was thoroughly disappointed. This book was very hard to follow at times because of the disorganization within the chapters. It had me wondering if the author had even reread what he had written. There is no research about ghosts, this is just the authors experiences with crime scenes. Truly disappointing.

[Thadd · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's some interesting things written but I felt the writing was quickly thrown together. There's a lot of unnecessary rambling going on in the pages of this book.

[Amy Spease · Rating 1 out of 5]

I like a ghost story book about haunted places and ghost and with a good steeped history, I found none of that in reading what I could stand to read of this book. However other's may have a different option.

[Diana · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is not a book of scary stories, is a journalistic narrative of events that have nothing to fear and are more like conversations with strangers uninteresting stories. It would be better to name the book "Stories of Watauga"

[KarnagesMistress · Rating 4 out of 5]

Purchased from Black Bear Books (at the time, Boone's independent bookseller) and printed in America by a publisher out of Charleston.