The poems in Folklore of Lunenburg County are rooted in the ethnography of Helen Creighton and the otherworldly stories of supernatural encounters that she collected on the south shore of Nova Scotia in the mid-twentieth century. For Goodfellow, these accounts evoke much more than quaint records of a primitive time and place. Ghost stories become a lens on human relationships; supernatural experiences become analogs for loss, longing, and disappearance, and for the way in which these experiences are mediated by landscape, nature, and community ritual.