With glaciers tucked in-between mountains, dark waters cloaking an abundance of marine life, and wild animals lurking just out of sight in copses of hemlock and spruce, many have viewed Southeast Alaska as a mysterious place.<\/p>\n
Outdoors and humor writer Bjorn Dihle taps into that sense of the Panhandle with his debut book \u201cHaunted Inside Passage: Ghosts, Legends, and Mysteries of Southeast Alaska.\u201d Through research and interviews, he recounts the tales of the ghost of Castle Hill in Sitka, the glacial demon on Valdez Glacier, encounters with the K\u00f3oshdaa K\u00e1a and numerous other stories.<\/p>\n
\u201cHaunted Passages\u201d wasn\u2019t the kind of book Dihle thought he was ever going to write. He had tried nature writing, but publishers kept rejecting book ideas. After one of many rejection notices, he received an email from Juneauite Carlton Smith, who had read a piece Dihle had published on the K\u00f3oshd\u00e1a Kaa (frequently written \u201ckushtaka\u201d) in the Capital City Weekly. Over coffee, Smith suggested he write a book. That night, Dihle sent out queries, and by the end of the week, he had a book deal. It set him on the path to penning many Southeast tales over a five-month period.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew 10 percent of what was in this book. So I just started basically reaching out to people, digging in archives,\u201d Dihle said. Many stories, he gathered through word of mouth. Oftentimes people would reach out to him with a tip, and that would set him off on a whole new series of interviews and trips to libraries. \u201cI\u2019m sure there\u2019s a bunch more out there, which I\u2019m sure would be interesting to gather too,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Some of stories, like the K\u00f3oshdaa K\u00e1a, a Tlingit legend of shape-shifters beguiling people out into the ocean or into the woods, intimidated Dihle. While it was also the hardest \u2014 he took at least a month to write it \u2014 he also considers it his favorite for how well it turned out.<\/p>\n
Some people fascinated him, like Edward Krause, who was dubbed one of Alaska\u2019s first serial killers. Other stories he found moving, like the man who traveled to Alaska to recover the body of his wife, who drowned in the sinking of the Princess Sophia.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a typical ghost story book. It\u2019s kind of a mixture of a lot of things,\u201d Dihle said.<\/p>\n
In this unique work, Dihle unites one part nature writing, one part memoir, and one part historical work under the thematic subject of supernatural stories in Southeast. Throughout the book, Dihle\u2019s strong voice for nature writing is clear, as well as a healthy dose of levity from his own life to lighten the often somber stories. Each story is not simply anecdotal asides from interviewees, but is set into its historical context, with many interesting facts to learn: Did you know some stampeders tried to get to the gold fields by crossing the Valdez Glacier, or that on Yakobi Island a skiff of Russian crewmen went missing?<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not really a ghost guy so I wanted the narrative to be more than something that goes \u2018boo,\u2019\u201d Dihle said on why he chose to combine so many different elements in the book. He said he wanted more depth to the stories and to examine the different things that haunt us.<\/p>\n
In the preface, Dihle wrote that most people were happy to talk to him about their experiences with ghosts and share their knowledge on events past; for some, it was even therapeutic (after all, having a supposed brush with the spirit of dead person could be unsettling). Only a few didn\u2019t wish to talk.<\/p>\n
As Dihle gathered the spooky stories, he found his mindset on the subject of ghost stories began to change. He describes himself as \u201can open-minded skeptic,\u201d but writing so many eerie stories had him thinking there must be some truth to them. When he presented himself as open and receptive to people\u2019s experiences, folks were excited to share, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was probably one of the most interesting things of the project for me was how many people I encountered \u2026 who have these ghost stories,\u201d Dihle said. Sometimes he\u2019d be talking about the project, and someone would overhear him and be eager to share their experience. He couldn\u2019t include every story he heard, choosing to keep his focus on stories specifically relevant to Southeast Alaska.<\/p>\n
The book will be officially released on May 2, but it had an early release in Alaska and can now be found at most local bookstores, like Juneau\u2019s Hearthside Books. Hearthside is hosting a reading on Thursday, April 20 at 6:30 p.m. at its Nugget Mall location.<\/p>\n
Currently, Dihle is awaiting edits on the manuscript of his second book, a collection of hunting and fishing stories expected to come out next March.<\/p>\n
Editor\u2019s note and disclosure: Bjorn Dihle is the boyfriend of Capital City Weekly editor Mary Catharine Martin, who asked Dihle if she could publish his story about exploring Thomas Bay, and associated ideas of the K\u00f3oshdaa K\u00e1a, one fateful week in 2015. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With glaciers tucked in-between mountains, dark waters cloaking an abundance of marine life, and wild animals lurking just out of sight in copses of hemlock and spruce, many have viewed Southeast Alaska as a mysterious place. Outdoors and humor writer Bjorn Dihle taps into that sense of the Panhandle with his debut book \u201cHaunted Inside […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":429,"featured_media":14899,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[74],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-14898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-arts-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/429"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14898"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=14898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}