America has its own mythology, and this 1896 collection proves it. Skinner gathered tales that had been whispered along the Hudson River, murmured in New England woods, and shouted across the Great Plains, weaving them into a tapestry that reveals a nation haunted by its own ghosts. The book opens with Rip Van Winkle's famous slumber, a man who escapes his life only to wake in a world that has moved on without him, and never loses that sense of eerie displacement. Here are headless horsemen galloping through Pennsylvania, water spirits singing in New York coves, and transformations that speak to something deeper: the terror and wonder of a young country confronting its own wildness. These aren't nursery rhymes. They are the stories Americans told themselves before cinema, before television, before the country had a settled past. They capture a moment when the land still felt ancient and strange, even as railroads bisected it. Skinner wrote these down at the century's end, when industrial America was already erasing the wilderness. What remains is a document of collective memory, strange and beautiful, showing how a nation invented itself through the supernatural.
