“Green-Eyed Phantom” Out!
Image via Petr Kratochvil (https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=111006&picture=spooky-forest)
I’ve got a fantastical history story, “Green-Eyed Phantom,” out in Whigmaleries & Wives’ Tales, which is a collection of stories about superstitions, legends, folklore, and wives’ tales. My story is a take on a legend about a spirit that haunts the Civil War battlefield in Chattanooga, Tennessee. But because I like to do odd things with my stories and settings, this one is set years after the battle ended, at a reunion held by veterans of the Civil War, which their families also attend.
Civil War veterans’ reunions became very popular in the years following the Civil War, and even brought together soldiers from both sides of the war at “Blue and Gray” events. I learned about them when working with the post-Civil War papers of Ulysses S. Grant, as he attended a number of them. So this story combined something new to me (the legend of the haunting of the battlefield) with something I already knew.
“Green-Eyed Phantom” is a slightly creepy but generally kid-friendly story. The protagonists are young women who charge headlong into danger, and there’s some talk of death. The anthology as a whole, however, isn’t geared toward younger readers, though it does avoid the use of some swear words.
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