Jennifer Green, the Director of Education at the Chester County History Center and a graduate of West Chester University, has penned a new book, Dark History of Penn’s Woods: Murder, Madness, and Misadventure in Southeastern Pennsylvania.

It is a compendium of local bizarre and spooky events, stories, and customs, released just in time for Halloween. Sandy Hingston braved its content for Philadelphia magazine.

Dark History of Penn’s Woods covers a timeline that stretches from the region’s earliest Swedish settlers to a mysterious case of spontaneous human combustion in Upper Darby in 1964.

Green, who worked as a guide at various local historical sites and museums, also offers some fascinating cultural analysis and quick summaries of everyday frontier life. She covers some of the unusual customs and phenomena, such as the widespread belief that touching the body of an executed criminal not long after his or her death could cure disease.

The book is a tribute to suburban Philadelphia weirdness, evildoing, and death and will provide readers with plenty of Halloween food for thought — such as learning that bodies of fallen soldiers used to be boiled down to the bones to make them easier to transport back to Europe.

Read more about the Dark History of Penn’s Woods in Philadelphia magazine.