This book recounts Miles journey to haunted sites and reports on her investigation of ghost tours, ghost stories, and historical events attached to the haunted places in the South. Miles believes ghosts stories function as projections of contemporary feelings about historical relationships at a safe distance. The book is focused on three key narratives that share characteristics (Sorrel-Weed House, Madame Lalaurie House, and Myrtles Plantation). They are linked by slavery and haunting.

Miles is 'ghost-writing' this book. She is telling the stories of the ghosts who cannot speak for themselves, and as reality is shifting she had to write and rewrite the narrative.

Miles explore how slave ghost tales function in Southern tourism and why portrayals of enslaved black ghosts are on the rise. She considers what the phantoms signal about memories of slavery in contemporary american culture and what the evocation of ghostly memory might tell us about the realities of historical slavery and gender relations.

Miles says "Ghost stories as a form of historical narrative therefore do double work: they call to mind disturbing historical knowledge that we feel compelled to face, but they also contain the threat of that knowledge by marking it as unbelievable."

Tales from the Haunted South is a very personable book. Its size is deceptive, as Miles covers a lot in such a compact book.

I'll end with this: Miles says "We can call forth the power of ghosts as scholars, writers, artists, teachers, and stewards of historic sites, as indeed we must if we are to place progressive social justice visions in contention with a culture possessed by ghost fancy."