Varla Ventura is a writer, traveler, rotten botanist, and lover of the strange. She has authored seven 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 seventh book, Enchanted Plants: A Treasury of Botanical Folklore and Magic (April 2025) explores the gardens and significant plants in both fairy and folk tales, where plants and their magic and medicine are central to the story. 

She has appeared on numerous in person-events, as well as TV, radio shows, including SF LitQuake, CBS Sunday Morning, Coast to Coast AM, Fade to Black with Jimmy Church, Spaced Out Radio, Paranormal 360 and more. Varla is also a Founding Fellow of Odd Salon. 

When not writing, researching, or reading volumes of forgotten lore, she can be found lurking about graveyards and forests in Minnesota, and tending her poison garden. 

Varla is also the head gardeness at Rotten Botany and occasionally makes an appearance at writhingink. She is also a contributing writer to Shadow Zine, most recently authoring Issue #3: Mark Twain’s Ouija Board Mystery. Check it out at shadowzine.com.