The podcast Appalachian Mysteria kicked off a few years ago by covering the 1970 murders of West Virginia University coeds Mared Malarik and Karen Ferrell. The two had hitchhiked back to their dorms after seeing Oliver! in the college town of Morgantown, West Virginia, and disappeared. Their headless bodies were found later in a nearby... Continue Reading →
Mini Reviews: The Quiet Zone, Mystery at the Blue Sea Cottage, Sex Cult Nun
Some minis today: A town with no WiFi, growing up in a sex cult, and the unsolved murder of a Jazz Age dancer. They have nothing in common besides their blue-green cover schemes. I didn't plan it that way, but I like it! The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence... Continue Reading →
Memoir and Unsolved Murders in Appalachia
Book review: The Third Rainbow Girl, by Emma Copley Eisenberg (Amazon / Book Depository) Emma Copley Eisenberg looks back on her time in Appalachia, in West Virginia's rural Pocahontas County, and the connection to a notorious unsolved double murder of two young women that took place in the region in 1980. The women, Vicki Durian... Continue Reading →
High Strangeness and Lore from the Midwest
Book review: Midwestern Strange, by B.J. Hollars (Amazon / Book Depository) Professor B.J. Hollars set out, after a challenge from his writing students, to investigate his region's tales of inexplicable monsters and events of "high strangeness," that is, "encounters that are improvable either as events or illusions." I've selected the Midwest as my testing ground... Continue Reading →