Cemetery Chapters
Dark Reads & Rituals
Stories worth unearthing
Exploring dark literature, historic cemeteries, folklore, haunting history, and the rituals that make stories linger.
About
Cemetery Chapters explores the intersection of historic cemeteries, dark literature, folklore, remembrance, and the quiet beauty of places where history still speaks.
Here, stories are found in many places: between the pages of a haunting novel, carved into a weathered headstone, hidden within local folklore, or waiting to be rediscovered in the past. Through books, cemetery exploration, preservation, history, and reading rituals, Cemetery Chapters is a place for stories worth unearthing.
More Than the Stories We Read
Not every story belongs on a shelf. Some are found in the quiet corners of an old cemetery, passed down through history and folklore, or discovered in the pages of a book that lingers long after it's finished.
Cemetery Chapters is about the atmosphere surrounding those stories—the weathered stone, the candlelight, the cup of coffee beside an open book, and the quiet moments that invite us to slow down and look a little closer.
Here, reading, history, remembrance, and ritual come together in a celebration of stories worth unearthing.
Among the Headstones
Historic cemeteries are more than resting places. They are landscapes of memory, filled with art, history, symbolism, and stories waiting to be rediscovered.
Cemetery Chapters explores these quiet places through photography, history, preservation, and the details left behind, from weathered inscriptions and carved symbols to the lives remembered beneath the stones.
Every cemetery has stories to tell. Sometimes, we simply have to slow down long enough to notice them.
Dark Reads
Dark, strange, atmospheric, and difficult to forget. Explore some of the books that have found a home among the shelves of Cemetery Chapters.
From USA Today bestseller and rising queen of atmospheric horror Darcy Coates comes a haunting story of intrigue, misery, and fear. There's something wrong with Ashburn House...
Everyone knows about Ashburn House. They whisper its old owner went mad, and restless ghosts still walk the halls. They say it's the dwelling place of something cruel and sinister. But when Adrienne―desperate and in need of a place to stay―inherits the crumbling old mansion, she only sees it as a lifeline... until darkness falls.
Strange messages are etched into the walls. Furniture moves when she leaves the room. There's something here―something powerful, angry, and hell-bent on shaking things up. Worse, a grave hidden in the depths of the forest hints at a terrible, unforgivable secret. Eventually Adrienne can't ignore that a twisted thing lives in the house, its hungry eyes ever-watchful. Chasing the threads of a decades-old mystery, it isn't long before she realizes she's become prey to something deeply unnatural and intensely resentful.
She has no idea how to escape. She has no idea how to survive. Only one thing is certain: Ashburn's dead are not at rest.
From award-winning author Elizabeth Hand comes the first-ever novel authorized to return to the world of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House—an "eerily beautiful, strangely seductive, and genuinely upsetting" (Alix E. Harrow) new story of isolation and longing perfect for our present time.
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Harper's Bazaar
Open the door . . . .
Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play Witching Night, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It’s enormous, old, and ever-so eerie—the perfect place to develop and rehearse her play.
Despite her own hesitations, Holly’s girlfriend, Nisa, agrees to join Holly in renting the house for a month, and soon a troupe of actors, each with ghosts of their own, arrive. Yet as they settle in, the house’s peculiarities are made known: strange creatures stalk the grounds, disturbing sounds echo throughout the halls, and time itself seems to shift. All too soon, Holly and her friends find themselves at odds not just with one another, but with the house itself. It seems something has been waiting in Hill House all these years, and it no longer intends to walk alone . . .
It’s Halloween night, 1984, in Coventry, Massachusetts, and two families are unraveling. Up and down the street, secrets are being revealed, and all the while, mixed in with the trick-or-treaters of all ages, four children who do not belong are walking door to door, merging with the kids of Parmenter Road. Children in vintage costumes with faded, eerie makeup. They seem terrified and beg the neighborhood kids to hide them away, to keep them safe from The Cunning Man.
There’s a small clearing in the woods now that was never there before, and a blackthorn tree that doesn’t belong at all. These odd children claim that The Cunning Man is coming for them...and they want the local kids to protect them. But with families falling apart and the neighborhood splintered by bitterness, who will save the children of Parmenter Road?
All Hallows. The one night when everything is a mask...
A stunning new paperback edition of the original vampire story that inspired Dracula — featuring blood-red sprayed edges, an eternally sexy spine, art deco design, and thoughtful layout for a seductive reading experience.
Steeped in the sexual tension between two young women, this is a beautiful, brand-new edition of the original cult classic which influenced Dracula and all the vampire stories that followed, including Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles.
In an isolated castle deep in the Austrian forest, Laura leads a solitary life with only her ailing father for company. Until one moonlit night, a horse-drawn carriage crashes into view, carrying an unexpected guest, the beautiful Carmilla.
So begins a feverish friendship between Laura and her entrancing companion, one defined by mysterious happenings and infused with an indeniable eroticism. But as Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day...
Pre-dating Dracula by 26 years, Carmilla is the original vampire story, a rediscovered classic of sexual tension and gothic romance.
Something darker than the devil stalks the North Carolina woods in Wolf Worm, a new gothic masterpiece from New York Times bestselling author T. Kingfisher
This gorgeous hardcover edition features endpapers illustrated by the author and a foil case stamp.
“I saw the devil in these woods.”
Sonia Wilson is a talented scientific illustrator―but she is only able to follow her dream because of her father’s reputation as a renowned scientist. Such is the lot in life for a woman in science in 1899. And after his death, she is left without work, prospects, or hope.
So when the reclusive Dr. Halder offers her a position illustrating his vast collection of insects, Sonia jumps at the chance to move to his North Carolina manor house and put her talents to use.
Once there though, she encounters dark happenings in the Carolina woods, and even darker questions come to light, like what happened to her predecessor? Why are animals acting so strangely, and what is behind the peculiar local whispers about “blood thieves?”
With the aid of the housekeeper and a local healer, Sonia discovers that Halder’s entomological studies have taken him down a twisted road. His ground-breaking discoveries come with a cost―one that Halder is paying with human flesh.
If Sonia can’t find a way to stop the monstrosity, she may be next under the knife.
Amidst the devastation of Ireland’s Great Famine, a young woman is salvaged from certain death when offered a mysterious position at a remote manor house haunted by a strange power and the horror of her own memories in this chillingly evocative historical novel braided with gothic horror and supernatural suspense for readers of Katherine Arden’s The Warm Hands of Ghosts and The Silence Factory by Bridget Collins.
County Clare, 1848: In the scant few years since the potato blight first cast its foul shadow over Ireland, Maggie O’Shaughnessy has lost everything—her entire family and the man she trusted with her heart. Toiling in the Ennis Workhouse for paltry rations, she can see no future either within or outside its walls—until the mysterious Lady Catherine arrives to whisk her away to an old mansion in the stark limestone landscape of the Burren.
Lady Catherine wants Maggie to impersonate her late daughter, Wilhelmina, and hoodwink solicitors into releasing Wilhelmina’s widow pension so that Lady Catherine can continue to provide for the villagers in her care. In exchange, Maggie will receive freedom from the workhouse, land of her own, and the one thing she wants more than either: a chance to fulfill the promise she made to her brother on his deathbed—to live to spite them all.
Launching herself into the daunting task, Maggie plays the role of Wilhelmina as best she can while ignoring the villagers’ tales of ghostly figures and curses. But more worrying are the whispers that come from within. Something in Lady Catherine’s house is reawakening long-buried memories in Maggie—of a foe more terrifying than hunger or greed, of a power that calls for blood and vengeance, and of her own role in a nightmare that demands the darkest sacrifice…
In this queer retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne classic gothic story, Rappaccini’s Daughter, a young woman is lured to a lush estate owned by a botanist who might be hiding dark secrets.
Cordelia Beecher is on the run. In search of her missing brother Edward, she has fled the oppressive charity school she was raised in, desperate to find the only family she knows. Using clues from his past letters, she sets off for the sleepy town of Farrow but everyone there claims to have never heard of Edward—not even the man he was supposedly working for as an apprentice.
With nowhere to go, Cordi turns to Lady Evangeline, a local botanist who owns the magnificent Edenfield estate. The benevolent lady of the manor has made it her mission to take young, often traumatized, women into her employ and protect them from man’s world of wicked desires and deceits. Hired as a maid and companion to her enigmatic daughters, Prim and Briar, Cordi quickly settles into Edenfield. Even as her relationship with Briar blossoms, Cordi can’t help but suspect that there are secrets in the estate…and when she stumbles across evidence that Edward was once there, she’s determined to find answers.
"I'm in your blood, and you are in mine…"
The Netherlands, 1887. Lucy's twin sister Sarah is unwell. She refuses to eat, mumbles nonsensically, and is increasingly obsessed with a centuries-old corpse recently discovered on her husband's grand estate. The doctor has diagnosed her with temporary insanity caused by a fever of the brain. To protect her twin from a terrible fate in a lunatic asylum, Lucy must unravel the mystery surrounding her sister's condition, but it's clear her twin is hiding something. Then again, Lucy is harboring secrets of her own, too.
Then, the worst happens. Sarah's behavior takes a turn for the strange. She becomes angry… and hungry.
Lucy soon comes to suspect that something is trying to possess her beloved sister. Or is it madness? As Sarah changes before her very eyes, Lucy must reckon with the dark, monstrous truth, or risk losing her forever.
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Dark reads featured by Cemetery Chapters are available through Sip on Stories, an independent bookstore.