By Embe Charpentier, special to Charleston Currents | Consider the last place among your travels that possessed a mythology all its own. Perhaps you heard a Caribbean fable after a Junkanoo parade, were regaled by an Appalachian storyteller or listened to a legend of Marie Laveau’s reign as voodoo queen of New Orleans. When you review the trip in your mind years later, the folklore lives on as intimately as the tastes, sights, and sounds of the region.

Charleston’s peculiar myths left me with an irresistible need to research. Where else do people so actively resist the incursion of the supernatural? Charlestonians paint a porch ceiling “haint blue.” Why?