Ed Southern (’94) already knew a thing or two about telling a good story by the time he graduated from Wake Forest as a (what was then called) Politics major with an English minor, and a reporter and editor for the Old Gold & Black.
Executive director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network since 2008, Southern has a number of books under his belt, including “Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South,” which was sparked by his marriage to Jamie Rogers Southern, the executive director of Bookmarks and a lifelong Alabama fan, and the contrasts between the ACC and the SEC, college basketball and college football, the South and the “Deep South.”
Now, just in time for this spooky season, Southern has edited a volume that draws on his roots: “The Devil’s Done Come Back: New Ghost Tales from North Carolina,” in which 15 of the state’s talented writers “reimagine and reclaim the stories of the ghosts who have haunted all corners of the state,” according to Blair, the anthology’s Durham-based publisher.
We caught up with Southern last week to ask a few questions about his latest work:
Kelly Greene: Congratulations on the book! I saw that you made the bestseller’s list for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, and a quick online search shows you getting rave reviews. Why did you decide to tackle ghost stories now, and why in North Carolina, specifically?
Ed Southern: To be honest, I was working on something else, and got stuck. Whenever I’m not sure what to write, I read, and this time I decided to go back and re-read some of the collections of North Carolina ghost stories that I’d grown up with, books by Nancy Roberts, John Harden, and Charles Harry Whedbee. I realized these classic ghost tales were overdue to be re-imagined and re-told.
KG: I love “Ol’ Jack Spooks the Devil,” your story, for which the book is named. What’s the origin of that story, and how did you update it?
ES: That story’s a mashup of the Jack Tales and the Devil’s Tramping Ground, and it first was a one-act play performed in the NC 10×10 Play Festival in 2018. If you don’t know about the Devil’s Tramping Ground, it’s a clearing in the woods outside Siler City (though I haven’t been there in thirty years: it may be a Harris Teeter parking lot now) where, they say, nothing will grow and nothing will stay in place overnight, because that’s where the Devil comes every night to pace and plot. I think it’s fascinating that storytellers put the Devil’s hangout almost exactly at the geographic center of the state. We might be telling on ourselves.
KG: You wrote another story titled, “The Kirk Road Bridge.” Where is Kirk Road? Is this a story you heard, created or embellished?
ES: I’m sure there’s a Kirk Road somewhere, but this one’s made up. I named it for an old friend, an editor I used to work with. The story was loosely inspired by the legend(s) of a haunted bridge on Payne Road outside Rural Hall. You can find those stories on several “spirit guide” websites and in several recent books, even though, one, the stretch that’s said to be haunted is on Edwards Road, not Payne Road, and, two, the haunted bridge was torn down and replaced with a culvert years ago.
That was too much fun not to write about. Admitting this may hurt book sales, but I’m not really interested in ghosts and the supernatural. I’m interested in what stories get told and re-told, and why.
KG: How did you find the other writers and stories?
ES: Connecting North Carolina’s writers and fostering community among them is my day job. I’ve been very fortunate to get to work with, and get to know, hundreds of writers all across the state and beyond, so I felt like I had a pretty good sense of who would be interested in contributing (and would contribute something good).
The hardest part was not being able to invite as many writers as I wanted. This book could have been the size of a dictionary. If it sells enough we’ll have to do a sequel.
KG: Have you ever thought about writing a ghost story with Wake Forest as the backdrop?
ES: Strangely, no, at least not the Reynolda campus. Reynolda House and Gardens already have some ghost stories told about them, though, and Worrell House (in London) just begs to be the site of some ghost stories.
Want to hear Southern discuss these scary stories for yourself? Here are his upcoming readings:
6:30 p.m., Oct. 22
with Julie Funderburk
Park Road Books, Charlotte, NC
6 p.m., Oct. 23
with Julia Ridley Smith and Ross White
Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, NC
6 p.m., Oct. 29
with Mark Powell and Zackary Vernon
Huzzah Books, Boone, NC
7 p.m., Oct. 31, 2025
Book Ferret, Winston-Salem
