Happy Halloween!
A riddle for you: what do you get when you cross Charles Fort with Henry David Thoreau? You get Danny B. Stewart, folklorist extrordinaire!
Danny Stewart is an on-the-ground folklorist who has collected hundreds of original stories in the greater Utah area. These stories consist of encounters with the fantastic, the impossible, the ghoulish, the loving, the benign, and the banal. They range from angry flying monkeys bouncing from tree to tree at elementary schools, headless children that haunt the Provo Tabernacle (now known as the Provo City Center Temple) and downtown Provo, gnomes and faeries that roam Lions Park in Provo, UT, ghosts that haunt basements in bars, and many different ventures into what Danny calls the Provo Vortex on Grandview Hill.
Danny’s ultimate charge is to challenge closely held assumptions of both academics and lay people. Reality is far stranger than we tend to think, but that strangeness need not be thought of as entirely evil and needing to be avoided. Indeed, life is far richer than the stale and paranoid realities we tend to create for ourselves, and we have people like Danny to thank for bringing that richness to our attention.
For more information on Danny and his ghost tours, check out his Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/provoutahghosttour
Check out this interview Danny did in Canada earlier thisyear: https://open.spotify.com/episode/01XH4hqCO4aKIJ7bPAgvA4?si=s1gJHghgTQm3gGE5nPJhOA
Special thanks to Emily Van Dyke for her photo graphic design.