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Varla Ventura
Varla Ventura is a writer, traveler, rotten botanist, and lover of the strange. She has authored six previous books on bizarre and freaky things, from the history of paranormal parlor games to plants that smell like corpses to mermaids, vampires, banshees, and other creepy creatures of the fairy realm. She is a committed supernaturalist, folklorist, and seeker of those shadowy things that scrape at your window in the dead of the night.
Her latest book, Enchanted Plants: A Treasury of Botanical Folklore and Magic (April 2025) explores the gardens of fairy and folk tales, where plants and their magic and medicine are central to the story. When not writing, she can be found lurking about graveyards and forests in Minnesota.
She is also the head gardeness at Rotten Botany and occasionally makes an appearance at writhingink.com
Varla Ventura is the author of Varla Ventura’s Paranormal Parlor: Ghosts, Seances and Tales of True Hauntings along with Fairies, Pookas, and Changelings: A Complete Guide to the Wild and Wicked Enchanted Realm.
Additional books include:
Among the Mermaids: Facts, Myths & Enchantments of the Sirens of the Sea;
The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories
and Beyond Bizarre: Frightening Facts and Blood-Curdling True Tales Bizarre.