The first talk by Russell Kirk biographer, James Person, tells of horror, terror, and the frightful kidnapping of Russell Kirk’s wife.

Harry Veryser, who was Russell Kirk’s ‘roommate’ when Kirk taught at Hillsdale College, tells of the ghosts, séances, exorcisms, and fiery deaths on Piety Hill, the ancestral home of Russell Kirk.

In the keynote address, Ignatius Press author Roger Thomas, drawing heavily from C.S. Lewis’s terrifying novel That Hideous Strength, examines the place of fear in literature and in the defense of the Permanent Things.  He also reads his soon-to-be-released eerie short story, ‘The Narrowing’.

The Dead Philosophers Society is a group of Kirk fans that has recently formed in Michigan that provides a forum for imaginatively conservative speakers.

This essay was first published here in October 2013.

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We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The Imaginative Conservative is an on-line journal for those who seek the True, the Good and the Beautiful. We address culture, liberal learning, politics, political economy, literature, the arts and the American Republic in the tradition of Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke, Irving Babbitt, Wilhelm Roepke, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, M.E. Bradford, Eric Voegelin, Christopher Dawson, Paul Elmer More and other leaders of Imaginative Conservatism. Some conservatives may look at the state of Western culture and the American Republic and see a huge dark cloud which seems ready to unleash a storm that may well wash away what we most treasure of our inherited ways. Others focus on the silver lining which may be found in the next generation of traditional conservatives who have been inspired by Dr. Kirk and his like. We hope that The Imaginative Conservative answers T.S. Eliot’s call to “redeem the time, redeem the dream.” The Imaginative Conservative offers to our families, our communities, and the Republic, a conservatism of hope, grace, charity, gratitude and prayer.

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