Lorraine Warren

There is a spot, about a twenty-minute drive from the New England town in which I grew up, where the devil is said to appear to hikers. It isn't known why he does this or if he's ever decent enough to bring a six-pack with him. But the legend is such that a high school friend of mine once refused to go there, presumably out of fear that she'd come back with a hex. That's New England for you, where growing up you assume that every town has its eerie old house and every county its howling boarded-up insane asylum. That diabolical trail is just one of countless spooky yarns native to the region, catalogued in collections of ghost stories you can buy in bookstores and airports.