Ed Karshner On Haints, Premonitions and Tricksters: Appalachian Folklore in Time

Appalachian folklore is often characterised as gloomy, backward looking and fatalistic—the hopeless stories of a people helplessly anchored to the past. However, a closer reading of tales about haints (ghosts), premonitions, and tricksters reveals a much deeper and far more pragmatic understanding of how individuals are situated in time and place. In these traditional tales, the past is narrated as a context for managing a mutable present toward a preferred future. Using unpublished folktales from the Leonard Roberts Collection, housed at Berea College’s Special Collection and Archives, this talk seeks to dismantle the notion of Appalachian nostalgia and fatalism as a cultural flaw and consider, instead, the practical wyrd-ness of an Appalachian “Haintology.”