This Land is Haunted
A Personal Reflection on Folklore Americana
When I started working on Folklore Americana, I didn’t want to make just another horror game.
I wanted to make a haunted game.
Not haunted just by ghosts—though there are plenty of those—but by memory, myth, and the kind of hurt that never fully leaves a place. I wanted to make a game that feels like walking through your grandparents’ land long after they’re gone. One that smells like rust, woodsmoke, and turned earth. One where you can almost taste the grit in the air and hear the creak of the screen door long after it shuts. A game that doesn’t flinch when it looks at America’s past—because flinching is how the worst parts of history get buried.
This wasn’t a marketing decision. It was a personal one.
And it wasn’t rushed. This project has been roasting slow for nearly eight years. Because I knew, deep down, that I couldn’t sell the setting until I understood it. Not just intellectually, but sensorially. I had to remember what it felt like to sit on a back porch while the sun set behind a broken barn. I had to know what desperation sounds like when it’s carried on the wind. I had to respect the weight of forgotten people, the thickness of poverty, and the silent dignity of places the world forgot.
This isn’t a game that’s just set in rural America. It’s a game that carries it. A letter to my past, our past.
Where I Come From
My family’s been in this country a long time. Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonites, French fur trappers, Scots-Irish settlers, and the sort of Appalachian stock that lives off the land whether it loves them back or not. I’ve got ancestors from the hollers of the north and the swamps of the south. Most of them never made the history books. But they left their imprint on me, on the soil, and even a few landmarks.
This is their game, in a way. Not just mine.
Because Folklore Americana isn’t just about monsters—it’s about the poor. The forgotten. The folks who built this country and paid the price for it. The tenant farmers and the factory hands. The veterans who came back with nothing. The drunks. The dreamers. The good women who married wrong and the kids who died early. It’s about your people and mine, and all those who bled and prayed and cursed and hoped for something better.
And it’s not nostalgia.
The Great Depression wasn’t some sepia-toned myth. It was a slow, grinding kind of hell. There was nothing wholesome about it. Not for Black folks under Jim Crow. Not for queer couples hiding behind closed doors. Not for single mothers who kept entire families alive while being told they didn’t matter. Not for the white sharecroppers who starved in the same fields they worked, their skin no shield from the system that crushed them.
That’s why this game doesn’t pretend.
It doesn’t glorify. It doesn’t sanitize. It remembers.
Because the past isn’t something we escape. It’s something we carry.
What Haunts Me: The Influences Behind Folklore Americana
You don’t write something like Folklore Americana out of thin air.
It’s a patchwork of everything I’ve read, seen, heard, and lived. It’s the cracked spine of an old almanac. It’s a scratched gospel record. It’s a dog-eared paperback found in a gas station. It’s a half-true story whispered on a porch after too much corn liquor.
This game was built from the bones of stories—some I grew up with, and some I found later when I went looking for ghosts in America’s shadow.
Books That Bled Into the Pages
Start with John Steinbeck—because the beating heart of this game is working-class suffering. The Grapes of Wrath isn’t horror, but it’s one of the most terrifying books I’ve ever read. The kind of slow, choking dread that comes from knowing the system doesn’t care if you live or die. That’s in this game.
Add Cormac McCarthy, especially Outer Dark and The Road. His worlds are brutal, biblical, stripped of comfort. His characters walk through landscapes that hate them. He writes about the Devil better than most theologians. If you read Folklore Americana and feel a chill—that’s McCarthy’s ghost at the edges.
Toss in a little Toni Morrison—because the land remembers. Beloved showed us what it means for a house to grieve, for the past to walk. You’ll see those echoes in our ghost stories. And Shirley Jackson, because no one captured dread like she did, especially when it was domestic, close, and quietly unraveling.
Movies That Shaped the Mood
I won’t pretend we’re reinventing the wheel. There’s a clear cinematic bloodline here:
The Witch — not just for its tone, but for its truthfulness about religion, fear, and isolation.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? — for its music, myth, and the dirty, golden vision of America it offers.
The Devil All the Time — for the violence of faith and the way sin sticks to everything.
Picnic at Hanging Rock — for what it doesn’t explain. For the haunting left behind.
Dead Man — that black-and-white western dreamscape where everything feels like it’s ending.
And one film that arrived just as Folklore Americana was cooking:
Sinners — a bold, genre-blending film set in 1932 Mississippi during Jim Crow, it blends supernatural horror, blues music, and historical trauma into something visceral and haunted.
It’s rare to see a vampire film grounded in blues, twin brothers returning to the Delta, and a sense of spiritual wound in the land itself. If Folklore Americana had a cinematic twin, this would be it.
The Soundtrack of the Setting
Music is the soul of Folklore Americana. It’s juke joints and tent revivals. It’s banjo strings and boot stomps. Some of the playlists on my desk while writing this:
Gillian Welch – for the aching beauty of poverty
Johnny Cash – for the weight of guilt and the sound of train tracks
Son House and Blind Willie Johnson – for the Devil in every bottle
Murder ballads – for the fact that our ancestors told horror stories to music
Spirituals and shape-note hymns – for the power of sorrow and salvation sung loud and off-key
And of course, so many more.
Real Stories, Real Places
But nothing’s haunted me more than the real stories—the ones passed down through families, etched into stone, or whispered in the dark when no one else is listening.
Tent preachers who preached damnation on Sunday and disappeared come Monday.
Miners who heard knocking inside the rock.
The ghost train of Casey Jones, still barreling across the South, its whistle lost to time.
The Devil at the crossroads, offering music, power, or escape—for a price.
Resurrection Mary waiting outside Chicago, always looking for a ride.
The Bell Witch tormenting a Tennessee farmhouse, whispering sins too old to name.
The Melonheads in the woods of Ohio, all teeth and silence.
Mothman watching from the treetops in Point Pleasant.
Rawhead and Bloody Bones hiding beneath the floorboards.
Paul Bunyan walking the forests like a fading god, forgotten but not yet gone.
John Henry still hammering, somewhere deep in the bones of a mountain.
Johnny Appleseed planting orchards no one dares to eat from.
A hymnbook full of songs no one remembers how to sing—only how to mourn.
These aren’t just encounters or chapter headings.
They’re the foundation of Folklore Americana. The country’s shadow-self. The half-remembered truth beneath the textbook version of history.
This is the folklore your grandfather hinted at but wouldn’t explain. The story your mother said not to tell. The thing your uncle saw once on a back road and never talked about again.
A Horror Game, Not a Tragedy
The horror in Folklore Americana isn’t just in the creatures that lurk at the edge of the map.
It’s in the weight of living.
It’s in the quiet.
It’s in the isolation that comes when your closest neighbor is a mile down the road—and they don’t wave back anymore.
It’s in the woods that haven’t been cleared, where something old and hungry still waits, untouched by time or scripture.
It’s in the fear that no one will remember your name.
The dread that the country moved on without you.
The whispered voice in the dark that says maybe you’re the monster after all.
It’s the horror of survival—of waking up each morning not knowing if your kids will eat, if your body will hold out, or if the bank will come with a piece of paper that takes your land. It’s the horror of not knowing who to trust—when the preacher smiles too wide, when the sheriff looks too long, when the man with the clipboard knows your name but not your story. It’s the ruin we see in every falling barn. The relics we carry in pockets because we’re afraid to throw them away. The weight of a country that feels like it’s dying, and the quiet, guilty voice that wonders if maybe we deserve it.
And through all of it—the monsters in the dark, the wilds we never tamed, the warnings we ignored from the people we murdered—there’s still something else:
Resistance.
Because Folklore Americana is a game about sin, yes. About fear and sorrow and the way history bleeds through the soil. But it’s also a game about what remains.
About the people who keep going.
The forgotten folk heroes who walk the land like fading demigods—John Henry, Paul Bunyan, Molly Pitcher, Johnny Appleseed.
The Granny Witches who know more than the preacher ever will.
The hobos who ride ghost trains and leave behind blessings in chalk.
The workers who organize, even when the company sends men with guns.
The lovers who hold hands in the dark and don’t let go—even when the town calls it a sin.
There’s beauty here.
There’s song.
There’s still a heartbeat in the land, faint and strange and wild.
Because Folklore Americana isn’t just horror.
It’s folklore.
And folklore belongs to the people.
Why This Game, and Why Now?
Because the stories we tell about America still matter.
Because the past isn’t past—not really. It lives in the soil, in the silence, in the places no one thinks to look. And in a time when people are desperate for easy answers and feel-good myths, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is tell a true ghost story.
Folklore Americana is the kind of game I wish I had growing up.
Not a game about chosen ones or golden-hearted heroes. I don’t believe in that. I don’t believe in destiny, in archetypes, in the idea that someone is meant to save the day and everything turns out fine. That’s not the world I’ve lived in, and not the heroes I have seen.
I believe in people.
People who stand up to challenges they didn’t ask for.
People who bleed, who break, who carry scars.
People who do what’s right—not because it’s easy or rewarded, but because it’s necessary.
People who make hard choices in murky places and keep going anyway.
Doing what’s right takes guts.
And more often than not, it means fighting—fighting systems, fighting silence, fighting the idea that nothing can ever change.
We all have that choice. We always have.
Like Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden:
“Thou mayest.”
We may. We can. We choose.
Folklore Americana is for the kids in the attic, flipping through old books, wondering what’s real. For the grown-ups who don’t trust the dark and find comfort in that back porch light. It’s for the folks who’ve lived their whole lives on the edge of something strange and sacred and never had the words for it.
Now you do.
Now we do.
