Penelope Pettiweather is a seeker of ghosts and legends, particularly those of the Pacific Northwest, and these stories are framed as her letters to friends recounting her supernatural inquiries.
Each tale begins with a history of the haunting and the location. While some readers might not like these “info dumps”, they are an integral part of each tale and give the ghostly subjects a feeling of place and realism.
The specters Ms. Pettiweather describes are quite diverse. There is the phantom of a drowned woman whose body turned to soap, a pair of vengeful laborers reborn as fire-wreathed hellhounds, a Native shaman preserving the sacred lands under a golf course, and more.
Not all of the stories are about ghosts, though. Ms. Pettiweather also relates tales of a giant freshwater octopus living in a drowned forest; an electric sea serpent that may actually have been a Victorian submarine; and even the famous cryptid Ogopogo of Lake Okanagan.
Since the stories are told in an epistolary style, either recounting the tale after the fact or relating tales told by someone else, there admittedly isn’t much tension to the stories. One doesn’t get the sense of “being there” for the hauntings. But these fictional tales are not meant to spook the reader. Rather, they are an homage to real-life guidebooks to regional haunts and mysterious locales, as well as conversational ghost stories such as the Christmas ghost stories of M.R. James or the Carnacki tales of William Hope Hodgson.. They are also a love letter by the author, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, to the area around Puget Sound and the Pacific Northwest where she lives.
