We, the writers of the Flyer, report the news, and sometimes we make the news. Case in point: Our reporter Toby Sells wrote a book. (Yay, Toby!) It’s called Haint Blues: Strange Tales From the American South (available on Amazon), and it’s about, well, strange tales from the South — UFO abductions, ghosts, Bigfoot, psychic horses, you get the gist. It’s the stuff that Sells just doesn’t stop talking about and now he’s written 20 chapters of it for anyone to read.
“I’ve been into unexplained and folklore stuff since I was in third grade,” he says in an official interview (not during an off-the-record office gossip session, for the record). “I won’t go into the whole story, but a friend of mine showed me the movie The Legend of Boggy Creek when I was at his house for a sleepover in third grade. I think I told you this before [Yes, Toby, you have]. That was my paranormal gateway drug. And I just started consuming every bit of media that I could find after that.”
Yes, that meant watching Unsolved Mysteries but that also meant digging into the archives and doing good old-fashioned research that eventually led him to creating the scripted podcast Haint Blues. “The show got, literally, dozens of listeners,” Sells says (brags?), adding that he recorded his last episode in 2020. “Those scripts kind of sat on the shelf for a little while, and then I was reading one day about average word length of books, and I was doing the math and thinking about how many scripts I had. Those were about 3,000 words each. And I thought, well, it’s getting pretty close. … I thought maybe that’s a way I could share these stories with people. And so I went back to the scripts and rewrote everything in a more nonfiction, prose style, but it still sounds really conversational and still sounds folksy. It’s really laid-back and Southern and comfortable.
“You know,” Sells continues, “all these stories, somewhere down the line, if they’re not just completely fabricated, involved real people at one point, and you want to treat that as respectfully as you can, and that’s what I tried to do. But I think what I really wanted to do is put these stories out as a collection of Southern culture. We all know about Southern food and Southern music, and what I hope I’ve done in the book is let everybody know that we have our own folklore traditions, too. … I think that stuff is as important to Southern culture as any other thing.”
This Friday, you can meet Sells at An Evening of Ghost Stories with Stephen Guenther, paranormal investigator and owner of Historical Haunts. They’ll both share paranormal stories and do a Q&A, and Sells will sign books after. “If you’re ready for an evening of spooky stuff, even before Halloween, come on out and join us, grab a beer,” Sells says.
An Evening of Ghost Stories, Memphis Made Brewing Co. (at the Ravine), Friday, July 26, 6 p.m.