Amber Newberry

Laurie Moran

Bret Valdez

Throngs of tourists pack the streets from Derby to Essex. Costumed children and adults visit haunted attractions and browse t-shirt shops and street vendors' booths. A veiled figure appears, and you catch her out of the corner of your eye, but she quickly disappears into the crowd... or perhaps into thin air? The night is filled with laughter and screams as the living walk shoulder to shoulder with the dead. Halloween in Salem has expanded into a month-long celebration of all things creepy, but in four hundred years of history, October 31st has held many mysterious customs and dark events, lost and forgotten in the passing of decades. From the cursed Puritan settlers to the Great Salem Fire of 1914, and the whispers of war in 1812 to the story of a bullet hole in an alley on Gedney Street, travel through time, as ghosts mingle with the living, glimpsing the Witch City on the most important night of the year, October 31st.

One Night in Salem

This is a facsimile edition of a book long out of print written by a former Durham Miner Laurie Moran and first published in 1988. It examines in depth the life and times of Brandon Colliery, a County Durham Pit Village from 1856 to 1960.It's a truly monumental work, a year by year commentary on Brandon with a staggering level of detail. It captures both the minutiae of life weddings, births, deaths, disease, accidents and crime combined with mini biographies of local people, descriptions (often brutal) of work down the pit mixed with events local and national, stories, jokes and banter. The book's subtitle "Portrait of a Colliery and its People" is probably more apt than its title.The author Laurie Moran sadly passed away in 2008 entries from 1916 follow his fortunes and the last few pages of the book see Laurie leave the Pit to start out on his own account.Laurie spent some ten years researching the book working his way through more than 6000 weekly editions of the local newspaper, the Durham Advertiser to put the book together.The book walks the reader year by year through the evolution of a Durham Pit Village and in many ways the whole of society from open fields in the mid 19th century to the closure of the last pit.

Laurie Moran

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