An American Ghost Story with Karen McCarthy

October 25th, 2026
1:00 PM-2:30 PM

$20

IN PERSON AT THE JOURNEY WITHIN

Gather round. It’s Halloween, and we’re telling ghost stories. American ones. Because it turns out, American ghosts are different.

Every country has haunted castles and crumbling old ruins full of restless spirits. America doesn’t, so our ghosts and ghost writers had to create a new kind of haunting for a new landscape and history.

Join Dr. Karen Frances McCarthy for a Halloween gathering as we trace these tales of the uncanny from their beginning to today. From the frontier to the gothic to the modern, we’ll meet Washington Irving’s headless horseman, Edgar Allan Poe’s murderer, haunted by his victim’s beating heart, Henry James’s governess, tormented by ghosts nobody else can see, Shirley Jackson’s unhappy house that drives everyone mad, and Toni Morrison’s daughter, who comes back from the beyond in one of the most original ghost stories ever written.
And we’ll end somewhere nobody else has gone. Almost every ghost, in every country, in every century, has wanted revenge, justice, or forgiveness. But in modern American tales, the ghost has given up haunting entirely. It simply continues on its own journey through the afterlife in some of the strangest and most colorful stories around. Why is that only happening in American ghost fiction?  We’ll find out.

There will be chills. There will be a few laughs. And by the end of the night, you’ll see why the ghost story is still full of surprises.