INTRODUCTION
Late one night about ten years ago, in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood, I found a folded note on my windshield addressed to a guy named Mario. My name’s Davy, so I knew it wasn’t meant for me—apparently, someone had confused my car for another guy’s car. But what else was there to do but read the message inside? Here’s what the note said, in a teenage girl’s angry scrawl:
       Mario,
        I f——ing hate you! You said you had to work, then why are you HERE, at HER         place?? You’re a f——ing liar! I hate you, I hate you.
        —Amber
        P. S. Page me later
To be honest, I thought the note was completely enchanting. I mean, she was so angry with Mario, but still obviously hopeful and in love, as revealed by her note’s sweet, funny coda: Page me later. And of course, it wasn’t even Mario’s car, parked in front of some rival girl’s apartment building; it was mine!

I shared that found note with some friends and was surprised by how many of them had finds to share with me in return: love letters, to-do lists, journals, kid’s drawings—all things coughed up by the neighborhood’s sidewalks, alleyways, and gutters. Each found scrap of paper they handed to me was more captivating than the last, offering raw and intimate peeks into the lives of strangers. I’d always been curious about the people around me—walking down the street, waiting next to me at the bus stop—and these found notes, it seemed, were a fascinating way to get inside the minds and hearts of the
people we share the world with, to learn about their fears, their hopes, and their dreams.

Soon after, I started FOUND Magazine as a way to celebrate these kinds of absorbing finds. Folks send us notes and letters they’ve found from all over the country and all around the world, and we compile our favorites once a year and publish them. It’s been really exciting to see a DIY magazine that began at a Kinko’s on North Clybourn continue to grow, finding its way to bookstores and subscribers’ mailboxes across the globe.

What I’ve learned from these notes, more than anything, is that everybody has a story to tell; that every person’s life is rich with private dramas, horrors, and triumphs. The guy in front of you at the grocery store, the young woman helping an old man across the street, the kids throwing snowballs in the church parking lot—each of them has their own set of deeply-textured experiences, powerful human emotions, stories they’ve lived, and stories they’ve collected. Picture, then, a few dozen kind souls from all walks of life sharing their favorite stories with you—that is the book you’re holding in your hands.

This magnificent volume is a collection of stories from a bustling corps of expert,
exuberant storytellers. Many are urban legends, tall tales, rumors, and ghost stories. Whether everything that happens in these stories actually happened or not, these are the stories that these talented writers once heard and have chosen to pass on. Stories are malleable; stories mutate. This doesn’t make them any less true. Their factuality is immaterial; it’s the canny observations and small life lessons sewn inside each one that demand a retelling.

You’ll also find, in these pages, stories from the authors’ pasts—new lands explored, adventures taken, and even, heartbreakingly, those roads not taken, and looked back on with regret. Sometimes the decisions we’ve made in our past loom large in retrospect, and sharing that story is a way of making peace with it. Sometimes we share stories about the ways we wish things had gone down. Our fantasies reveal as much about us as the day-to-day nuts and bolts of our lives.

Other stories here are memories of beloved friends and family, childhood nemeses, and local clowns and neighborhood saints. It always amazes me how those distinct characters from our pasts continue to populate our imaginations, even as the years go by. Within this collection, you’ll meet such memorable figures as Two Gun Pete; Miss Bee, the voodoo queen of New Orleans; the benevolent Dr. T. K. Lawless; and Deacon Jones, who rose from the dead at his own funeral, plus ghastly haunts like The Sack Man, The Wahoo Man, The Boogieman, and even The Boogerman, among many others. All are indelible in their own right.

Why do we choose to tell one story and let another go untold? The act of sharing a story, in itself, is a way of highlighting the experience, of saying,“Hey, this happened to me, or to someone I know, and it was important.” We’re saying, “Out of the world’s zillion stories, in this moment I want you to hear this one.” Just as we cull through shoeboxes full of photographs and choose only our favorites to put into the scrapbook, this volume collects the persistent memories and supernatural tales that have always stayed with us.

Interspersed here, among these delightful vignettes, are some favorite found images, notes and letters sent in by readers of FOUND Magazine. Frequently, these scraps of others’ lives are not full stories of their own, just a fragment of a story, but they invite you to fill in the blanks and imagine what the rest of the story might be. The odd magic of stories that are shared in the school yard, the church, the barbershop, or at Sunday dinner, is, in fact, their incompleteness. Because we don’t know every last detail, when we retell them we become the authors of these stories ourselves, filling in the gaps as best we see fit.

In my eyes, the world is not made up of molecules, or bricks, it’s composed of stories: stories to amuse you, stories to frighten you, and stories that illuminate some particular aspect of the human condition. There’s a reason that stories are told and retold for generations—it’s these stories that remind us who we are, what we hope for, and what we’re afraid of. Stories are the building blocks of our world.

I loved every page of this volume, and I know you’ll draw enjoyment from it, too. Maybe, like me, you’ll relate to certain pieces in a powerful way. Maybe others will make you laugh or tear up. As you read through the warm, unusually soulful, and thought-provoking stories here, I hope you’ll take note of the stories that spark to life in your own mind, the long-ago memories, the anecdotes you’ve overheard at work, the tales your grandparents might have told with a sparkle in their eye. And I hope you’ll write them down, or find a way to share them with others. Because a story can live on forever, as long as there’s someone around to give it life.

These blocks have spoken, and oh, what stories they have to tell! Read on, my friends, and enjoy!

Davy Rothbart

COAL CITY SUPERSTITIONS
Adam Farcus

Squirrel Tails
If the cows are lying down in the pasture, it will rain soon.
If you stomp on a rat and it doesn’t die, your mill is in trouble.
To avoid the curse of a black cat about to cross your path, curse profanely
until you pass it.
Hedge apples will keep rodents away.
If you hear an owl, you have a guardian protecting you.

Leftover Paper Plates
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.
Looking at pornography will make you go blind.
The left thumb will turn black in sympathy for a smashed right one,
and vice versa.

Train-Flattened Pennies
An upside-down penny is unlucky.
A lucky penny, once washed, will no longer be lucky.
You are in love if your cigarette will only half light.

Garage Sale T-Shirts
If you see an apparition in your rearview mirror, put a tea leaf on your back
seat to keep him away.
A neighbor’s haunted attic should always be unfinished on the west side.
A girl thrown from her bed by a ghost will grow freckles over her bruises.
A broken bone caused by falling into a mine shaft will be haunted.

Cornfield Arrowheads
Coal brings bad luck. A cow’s tooth brings good luck.
Buried trauma will always be dug up.
Old shoes deliver noble fortunes.

Craft Fair Booths
Drinking pop after dinner will cause nightmares.
Falling into a mineshaft is a bad omen.
A full moon casts long shadows.
Still water will reflect the greatest truths.