American folklore and antiquarianism

Samuel Adams Drake

1833 – 1905

Samuel Adams Drake was a Boston-born historian and journalist who devoted much of his career to documenting New England's regional legends, haunted locales, and colonial superstitions. His A Book of New England Legends and Folk-Lore in Prose and Poetry (1884) remains a foundational text for American ghost-lore and regional supernatural tradition, preserving vanishing oral histories at a time when industrialisation was erasing the older layers of folk belief.