Festival Highlights

Southern Gothic continues to evolve as writers revisit its traditions and push into new territory. Festival conversations explore the Gothic in Southern Gothic through ghosts, hauntings, uncanny landscapes, and the legacy of Poe; consider how Southern horror writers transform contemporary social and technological anxieties into new monsters; confront some of the South’s darkest realities through conversations about race, masculinity, class, and identity; and ask how today’s writers are expanding, challenging, and redefining what Southern Gothic can be.

Southern Gothic has always looked unflinchingly at the South’s violent past and unsettling present. This year, the festival explores how we confront that history through literature, theater, music, and the stories of people who lived it.
In partnership with the Arts Center of Kershaw County, the festival presents Shock, an original play about a dysfunctional family navigating poverty, religious mania, mental illness, and violence in rural South Carolina. The darker side of Southern history can also be heard in the music of The Mill Hands, with an evening of murder ballads and other dark songs rooted in the bluegrass tradition.
Behind the Headlines: The Susan Smith Case brings together people who were directly involved in one of South Carolina’s most notorious criminal cases—a prosecutor, investigator, and clerk to the presiding judge—to reflect on the investigation, trial, and its lasting impact.
And writers David Joy and Jason Mott join poet Ray McManus for Southern Man: Race and Masculinity in Southern Writing, a serious conversation about how Southern writers grapple with race, masculinity, class, identity, and the places where those forces can converge with violence.
Together, these events ask us not simply to revisit the South’s darker stories, but to consider how art, history, and storytelling help us understand the violence in our past and present.

Some of the South’s most enduring stories live somewhere between history, memory, folklore, and the unexplained. This year, we turn our attention to stories from Camden and the Carolinas—and to the people who preserve, investigate, and retell them.
Revisit Camden’s famous Agnes of Glasgow legend with the Southern Gothic podcast and explore how ghost stories evolve over generations—and how we separate documented history from the legends that grow around it. Discover the long tradition and cultural importance of African American folklore and storytelling with storytellers who keep those traditions alive. Then venture into the stranger side of Carolina lore with cryptids, paranormal encounters, and the unexplained, while considering how podcasts and contemporary storytelling can entertain us and preserve the stories of our communities.
And, of course, you can experience some of Camden’s haunted stories where they happened. Sign up early for the ghost tours—they sell out fast.

Look back at some of the history, traditions, and darker stories that helped shape Southern Gothic—and see how contemporary writers and artists continue to draw on them.
Explore Edgar Allan Poe’s Southern roots and his influence on Southern Gothic writing today in Poe and Place: The Original Southern Gothic. Poe will also be evoked through the haunting music of Valentine Wolfe, whose Victorian-inspired performances include musical interpretations of his work.
Step further into the 19th century with writer and historian Kim Poovey’s collection of Victorian mourning jewelry, created to remember and honor the dead in an era when death was an ever-present part of life.
The past also finds its way into contemporary fiction. Scott Gould joins the Beyond the Grotesque panel following the publication of Beneath a Falling Sky, set amid the fear and religious fervor surrounding Halley’s Comet’s 1910 appearance and the secrets of a small Appalachian community.
And throughout Saturday, visit the independent authors in McCaa Tavern, including local historian Miles Gardner, author of the three-volume Murder & Mayhem in Kershaw County, chronicling real incidents from the 19th and early 20th centuries that can be as harrowing as any fiction.