About the Book

Charles M. Skinner gathered the local legends of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, when many were still being told rather than read — hauntings, buried treasure, devil's bargains, Indian legends of the mountains and the lakes, and the tales attached to particular rocks, houses and stretches of water.

The stories are arranged by region, so a reader can walk through the folklore of Puritan Land, the Hudson, the Southern mountains or the Great Lakes in turn.

Skinner retells Native American traditions at second hand and in the idiom of his time; where the text carries period language it is left exactly as printed, with an editor's note.

This digital edition is built from a dual-engine OCR, reconciled page by page.

This site reproduces the complete text of the original 1896 edition, digitized page by page from the original printing. The book is in the public domain.