610 pgs.
Spirits of the Mahoning is a sweeping narrative that blurs oral history, folklore, and speculative realism to explore the psychic residue of Ohio’s industrial collapse. Framed as a field journal compiled by folklorists, psychics, and machinists, the story documents a century’s worth of hauntings and inexplicable phenomena along the Mahoning River – apparitions in slag fields, machinery that hums with voices, and spectral figures born from labor itself.
The narrative unfolds through interwoven stories from steelworkers, preachers, union organizers, and survivors of ecological disaster. As their accounts overlap, the Mahoning Valley itself begins to emerge as a living consciousness – an ecosystem of grief and endurance made up of human memory, chemical pollution, and myth. Each haunting reveals a different “spirit” of the valley: automation ghosts that replay factory routines, ancestral protectors shaped from coal dust, and luminous entities feeding on electromagnetic residue.
The text ultimately suggests that these phenomena are not merely supernatural, but manifestations of generational trauma and collective will. The river’s “spirits” are both the dead and the living – workers, families, and dreamers whose energy never left the valley, only changed form.
Blending industrial archaeology, parapsychology, and Rust Belt Gothic imagery, Spirits of the Mahoning serves as both archive and elegy – a document of how people and places remember one another long after the machinery stops.
FIRST PAGE EXCERPT
“The Mahoning Valley, carved by the winding river
that shares its name, is a place etched as deeply by
history as it is by water. Nestled in the heart of what
would become America’s industrial core, this corner
of northeastern Ohio carries more than just the
legacy of steel mills and smokestacks. It holds
whispers, echoes of events and lives that refuse to
fade entirely into the past. These are the stories that
cling to the landscape like morning mist on the river,
tales of the uncanny, the unexplained, the spectral
residents who share the valley with the living. This
book is an invitation to lift the veil, to explore the rich
tapestry of paranormal folklore that defines the
Mahoning Valley, a region where the weight of history
often feels palpable, and the line between memory
and haunting blurs.
To understand the valley’s unique brand of mystique,
one must first appreciate its geography and its past.
This is not a land of ancient castles or grand, gothic
manors in the European sense. Its hauntings are woven
into the fabric of a more recent, yet intensely lived,
history. The valley floor, shaped by glacial retreat and the
persistent flow of the Mahoning River, provided fertile
ground first for Native American settlements and later
for pioneers pushing westward into the Connecticut
Western Reserve. The river itself, a vital artery for
transportation and later for industry, became a central
character in the valley’s story, witnessing its triumphs and
tragedies, its periods of booming growth and devastating
decline. The rolling hills, dense woodlands, and hidden
hollows that surround the riverbanks offered both sanctuary
and isolation, settings where strange occurrences could take
root in the collective imagination.