SOURCE: Newman, R. Andrew. “Pilgrimages and Easter Destinations in the Ghostly Tales of Russell Kirk.” Modern Age 40, no. 3 (summer 1998): 314-18.

In the following essay, Newman examines the theme of Christian pilgrimage as it appears in Kirk's ghostly fiction.

For Russell Kirk ghost stories were not mere exercises in gore or terror without purpose. A gulag-and-gas-chamber-infested twentieth century provides demonic fright enough. With scary stories he sought to reawaken a sense of a greater reality, of a world that touches the physical, in an age smothered by materialism and the decay of traditional religion—and to partake in a bit of eerie fun as well. As for ghosts, Kirk thought them very real and claimed ghostly folk lived right alongside his family at Piety Hill, his ancestral home in Mecosta, Michigan. “Have I ever seen a ghost?” the conservative philosopher and historian asked. “Why, I am one, and so...