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cover art for ‘True Ghost Stories’  — on reality, life and death

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‘True Ghost Stories’ — on reality, life and death

Two creative men from Altamont have gathered ghost stories from village residents and surrounding areas into a book. Neither is a stranger to imagination and yet they have labeled these stories as true.

Tom Capuano, a retired professor, once wrote a book-length narrative poem on the founding of Altamont, grounded in history but with imaginative creation of characters. He raises sheep now in an 18th-Century barn on land that both figure prominently in some of the ghost stories.

Thom Breitenbach, an artist who lives in a castle he built on the hillside above the village, wrote and produced a musical about Hieronymus Bosch, a 15th-Century Dutch artist who, like Breitenbach, creates imaginative creatures. In Breitenbach’s musical, those creatures come alive.

So where does each draw the line between imagination and reality?

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