Appalachian Whispers: The Witch of Cripple Creek: Dark Mountain Folklore, Cursed Bloodlines, and the Secrets Buried in the Hollow (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798250532556)

Some sins don't stay buried. Some wrongs don't die with the condemned.

Deep in the shadow-draped hollows of Cripple Creek, Virginia, a woman named Edith Calloway was tried, condemned, and cast out by her own mountain kin - not for evil, but for knowing too much. A root healer. A keeper of old ways. A woman the ridge folk feared because she could not be controlled.

She vanished into the hollow on a January night in 1887. But before she disappeared, she left behind one thing - a journal, hidden and locked, filled with names. The names of every family that condemned her. And a single entry beside one name that read only: Soon.

That name was Vance.

Generations later, Della Vance returns to her grandmother's mountain cabin to settle an estate and discovers the journal waiting for her - as though it always knew she was coming. What she finds inside is not a ghost story. It is something quieter and more devastating: a precise accounting of what her family did, written in the hand of the woman they destroyed.

To honor what Edith left behind, Della must walk the same hollow roads, find the descendants of the thirty-two families, and do the one thing her bloodline has avoided for a hundred and thirty-seven years - speak the truth out loud, in the place where the wrong was done.

The hollow has been holding something since 1887. It's been waiting for someone with the courage to take it back.

Perfect for fans of dark Appalachian folklore, Southern Gothic fiction, and haunting tales rooted in the old mountain ways.