Beth Demmon

From voodoo ceremonies to witchy gatherings, this time of the year the city comes alive with the dead.

It’s an especially sticky day in late July on Long Point, a waterfront community on the shores of Lake Champlain in northern Vermont. The usually crisp New England air is thick with thunder, but even as droplets of rain begin to fall, Sue Lackey remains unfazed. The feisty upstate New Yorker has spent her summers vacationing here for nearly 40 years and she’s eager to talk about one thing: the day she saw Champ.
Like the Loch Ness Monster, its more famous Scottish counterpart, Champ is a lege...

Meet Ken Layne, the one-man show behind the cult zine and radio show
It’s 60 degrees in early January in Joshua Tree, California and the fiery cloud-speckled sunset foreshadows rain to come. There’s a post-apocalyptic vibe in the air; we’re a few weeks into a partial government shutdown and the namesake national park reflects a sense of chaos and calamity that writer and radio host Ken Layne describes as “an overnight collapse of any kind of basic social order.”
Anarchy already thrives in the...

Teetering on the edge of the continent and blanketed under an almost eternally cloudless sky, ocean waves gently undulate atop the black-streaked beach. Close your eyes and it’s as though you’ve left all signs of society behind in favor of an unspoiled Arcadian panorama.
But glance southwards and the reality of today’s stark borders—both physical and mental—brings you screeching back to the real world. An imposing wall of jagged steel mars the landscape, cutting into the ocean that unites Nor...

The trip started with a text to my cousin. “I need to pick your brain – I’m driving to the Imperial Sand Dunes, what should I do there?”
My cousin, who’s lived in the beach town of Encinitas nearly his entire life, is my go-to desert guide. He’s a prolific partier with a heart of gold hidden behind a facade of ornery old cuss. He’s also a frequent off-roader in the semi-anarchic area in the southeast California wilderness between Brawley and Yuma, Arizona and has been for years.
“I like Gordo...