| GHOST ROAD BLUES |
Local
Author Strikes it Big
By
Willard Fowler Newton
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 PINE DEEP, PA -- Police asked for the public's help on Saturday
in finding three suspects wanted in the murder of a Philadelphia
police officer and the wounding of two others following a gun battle
over narcotics.
Officer Randall Johnston, 34, a twelve-year veteran
of the Narcotics Division, was allegedly gunned down by Karl Ruger,
a man sought as a suspect in a series of killings in South Jersey.
Injured in the shootout were Detective Sergeant Nelson Chambers,
40, and Detective James Burr 35, both of Detectives East Division.
Both officers were treated for minor injuries and released.
Also killed in the gun battle were seven members
of a Jamaican drug posse and two members of a South Philadelphia
crime family. Names are being withheld pending investigation and
notification of next of kin. Continue reading story...
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Pennsylvania
author Jonathan Maberry, 47, has landed a multi-book deal
with Pinnacle Books for both fiction and nonfiction. The
first of three horror thrillers, Ghost Road Blues, is scheduled
for release in June of 2006, with the rest of the trilogy
following shortly after. Ghost Road Blues is set in a fictional
Bucks County town called Pine Deep, and is a big, sprawling
epic horror. Jonathan also sold a nonfiction book on the
folklore and mythology of monsters called VAMPIRE UNIVERSE:
The Dark World of Supernatural Beings That Haunt Us, Hunt
Us, and Hunger for Us, which is due in September of 2006,
just in time for Halloween.
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| The Haunted History
of Pine Deep |
 Pine
Deep - Pine
Deep, Pennsylvania has always been known as a spooky place. Named
by Time Magazine “the Most Haunted Town
in America”, Pine Deep has built an industry around jolting
shrieks and gasps from the thousands of tourists who flock there
every year to join in the scary fun of the largest Haunted Hayride
in the country, or attend the Monster Movie Marathon, or sit in
on the great Halloween Rock Concert that wakes the dead every year.
But there is a truly dark side to “America’s Haunted
Holidayland”, and this month marks the thirtieth anniversary
of its most chilling --and very real—moments of horror. Beginning
in the late summer of 1976 and lasting all the way to Halloween,
the town of Pine Deep suffered through two terrible events. The
first was the Black Harvest -a time of sickness that saw almost
every farm’s crops turn black with disease, the livestock
drop in their tracks, and dozens of residents come down with a
dreadful wasting sickness that was never properly diagnosed.
“It was like living during the Black Plague,” recalls
Ethel Marsters, 73, owner of the Mmm-Mmm Good Soup Greens Farm
on Route A-32. “We lost nearly everything. Almost had to
sell our farm.”
Henry Guthrie, 64, owner of the areas largest corn and pumpkin
farm, said, “Strangely, our farm wasn’t hit very hard
by the plague, but a lot of my friends went bust that year. And
nearly every family lost someone to disease. Or worse.”
Continue
reading story..
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