"The hour has come to speak of troubled times. It is time we spoke of Skullyville." Thus begins Rose Goode's story of her growing up in Indian Territory in pre-statehood Oklahoma. Skullyville, a once-thriving Choctaw community, was destroyed by land-grabbers, culminating in the arson on New Year's Eve, 1896, of New Hope Academy for Girls. Twenty Choctaw girls died, but Rose escaped. She is blessed by the presence of her grandmother Pokoni and her grandfather Amafo, both respected elders who understand the old ways. Soon after the fire, the white sheriff beats Amafo in front of the town's people, humiliating him. Instead of asking the Choctaw community to avenge the beating, her grandfather decides to follow the path of forgiveness. And so unwinds this tale of mystery, Indian-style magical realism, and deep wisdom. It's a world where backwoods spiritualism and Bible-thumping Christianity mix with bad guys; a one-legged woman shop-keeper, her oaf of a husband, herbal potions, and shape-shifting panthers rendering justice. Tim Tingle--a scholar of his nation's language, culture, and spirituality--tells Rose's story of good and evil with understanding and even laugh-out-loud Choctaw humor.

Tim Tingle, responding to a scarcity of Choctaw literature, began interviewing tribal elders in the early '90s. His collection "Walking the Choctaw Road" was the Oklahoma Book of the Year. Tingle's children's book, "Crossing Bok Chitto," garnered over twenty state and national awards, including Best Children's Book from the American Indian Library Association, and was an Editor's Choice in the "New York Times Book Review."

Travis Lee begins his new career, as an insurance investigator, by doing a job in Venezuela, and then takes his son, Chris, on a vacation to visit Machu Picchu, in Peru. But with Travis, a vacation is never just a vacation, ...it's an adventure

Travis Lee is out of work when his mine closes, but it doesn't take long to find a new job, while he and Joey are gone to Italy. In the meantime, back home in Alabama, his boys find that trouble can literally fall from the sky, when a drug smuggler's plane crashes near their camp.

Travis Lee takes his son Drew to England for his senior trip, and at the same time, he feels out his new publisher, Jester Books. But the real story is what is going on back home in Alabama while they are gone. With five restless teenage children living under the same roof, and 'colorful' neighbors dropping in, there is never a dull moment at the Lee household.

Lester Graff is Part Five in the Travis Lee Series. In this story, while sitting around a camp fire, Travis recounts the strange tale told him by an old man years earlier. More than just a tale, it was the old man's dying confession to a life overshadowed by murder, and the tangled web he wove to keep his deeds from coming to light. Travis himself becomes entangled in that web, and almost becomes the old man's last victim.

This story is Part Four, in the continuing Travis Lee series. As you will remember from Part Three, 'Eye of the Sorcerer'. .Travis Lee had finally returned home from a harrowing experience in Colombia, South America, where he was working for his employer, Southern States Energy Company. In addition to the dangers of being kidnapped by a drug cartel, and surviving a plane crash in the jungle, he now has a new worry, one of a supernatural kind. He has become the target of a Tucano Indian sorcerer, who believes that Travis has stolen something valuable from him, and he will stop at nothing to get it back. Using his power to create illusions, the sorcerer will try to get it back, and take revenge on Travis for taking it from him. Part Four, 'Illusions', begins as Travis is arriving back home, just weeks before he is to take his wife on their second honeymoon trip to Greece. But little does he know, the danger he is in, as the old sorcerer closes in on him, and even follows him on the plane to Greece.

Travis Lee and Miranda Monroe are taken in by missionaries in Southern Colombia. While there, Travis recounts the events of his visit there twenty years earlier, and comes face to face with an old sorcerer bent on revenge. They face a danger more terrifying than anything they have ever known. Travis also gets to the bottom of what is really going on at his company's Colombian coal mines, and the answer is simple but surprising. This is Part Three of the Travis Lee Series, the sequal to 'Return To Colombia'.

A beady-eyed varmint crawls through the floor of a lonely old mans cabin. A boy spends the night in a haunted house, complete with a grinning skeleton in the chimney. A girl foolishly taunts a giant owl-woman. A young mans prom date has a spooky secret. The Hairy Man will catch you unless you can fool him three times. Graveyard ghosts and creatures from swamps and riverbanks slink through ten creepy tales presented by master storytellers Tim Tingle and Doc Moore. Guaranteed to send shivers down the spines of younger readers, each of these stories comes with its own eerie illustrations. Some humorous, some haunting, these tales guarantee thrills and chills for youngsters from any state.

This title is 'Storytelling World/Storytelling Magazine' Award Winner. 'I love a book that gives me what it promises, and this one does: fifty real ghost stories, drawn from a variety of sources and told in as many voices, written so as to simulate the language and delivery of a face-to-face performance, and artfully, delightfully done' - ""Review of Texas Books"". 'Scarcely a page will you turn in this collection of ghost stories in Texas without encountering a disembodied hand or a fang babycreatures guaranteed to shock the shell of an armadillo...Whether you read the tales out loud or spin them around a campfire, youand your audiencewill be spooked. And you'll never again saunter along a dark, deserted riverbank late at night' - Patti Ross, ""San Antonio Express-News"". Some humorous, some haunting, and some just late-night terrifying, these stories, gathered by two favorite Texas tellers, span a rich cultural heritage from the earliest Spanish explorers to the present, from ""La Llorona (the Weeping Woman)"" to the ""Vanishing Hitchhiker"" . Introduced by John O. West and John L. Davis, two of Texas most respected folklorists, the stories include tales adapted by European settlers to their new southwestern settings, more historically rooted legends about such early pioneers as Britt Bailey of the Gulf Coast prairie and Josiah Wilbarger of Austin, and those notorious contemporary cautionary tales known as urban legends. With two appendixes addressing selection, learning, and telling of stories as well as sources and scholarship, ""Texas Ghost Stories"" is a full-service compendium for tellers, teachers, readers, and collectors. Celebrating both the blending and the diversity of Texan cultures through the timeless stories we love to be scared by, it is a treasury for all Texans and for those who really want to know us.

The fearsome Chupacabra stalks the desert valley, while a grandson wanders far from the ranch.

The woman who's just moved to the neighborhood wears strange sunglasses after dark. What could be behind them?

A man picks up a hitchhikeronly to discover that his passenger is not human.

Kids of all ages will find chills and thrills in these tales of the weird, the macabre, and the mysterious, all collected from the lore and legends of the Lone Star State. In addition to "Skinwalker," the authors' most requested school concert story, this new volume adds spine-tingling twists on the account of La Llorona, the weeping woman, said to be the world's best-known ghost; the classic tale "The Money's Paw"; the story of "The Screaming Banshee Cattle of the Night Swamp," and seven others.

Told with humor and lively modern-day detail, these renderings by veteran storytellers not only please and entertain but preserve a wealth of folklore from a culturally diverse region of the country.