Welcome to Portico
Nestled at the edge of Oregon, Portico is a town where the supernatural and the mundane share the same narrow streets. Some call it cursed.
Others call it haunted by its own history, rooted in the blackened remains of an oak tree known as the Witch’s Throne. What’s left of it rises from the forest floor like the bones of something that refused to stay buried.
Locals say the Throne marks the place where Adeline Tenatree was condemned and burned more than a century ago.
The legend endures: whoever sits on the Throne dies within three days.
Over the years, people have tried to explain the tragedies that happen in Portico—accidents, suicides, disappearances. But no one can agree on whether it’s superstition, guilt, or something older that still holds this town in its grip.
In Portico, belief and skepticism are both acts of faith.
About the Series
Told through intersecting lives and mysteries, each story in the world of The Witch’s Throne reveals a new facet of the same haunted legacy:
a curator who learns that every artifact is a story someone wanted to control,
a police officer confronting mysteries his training can’t explain,
two girls bound forever by what happened at the Throne in 1964,
and a widow searching for truth in her husband’s death—and her own doubts.
Whether read alone or together, these stories form a mosaic of fear, belief, skepticism, and the fragile ways we seek meaning in a world that refuses to explain itself.
Explore the World of Portico
Each story in The Witch’s Throne world stands alone but connects through the same shadowed thread, the Throne legend, and the people drawn into it.
The Curator
When Vera White returns home in disgrace, she takes a job at the Portico Historical Museum and discovers that the town’s past isn’t just being preserved—it’s being rewritten. Between forged journals, secret meetings in the woods, and the death of her employer, Vera begins to suspect that history is the most dangerous story of all.
Dragonfly
Officer Adam Tims believes in evidence, not superstition. But when a woman is found dead near the Witch’s Throne, he finds himself confronting patterns that refuse logic—and a symbol that keeps appearing where it shouldn’t. As the line between fact and folklore erodes, Adam has to decide which truth he can live with.
Three Days and Thirty Years
In 1964, Sosie Powell lost her best friend, Jane Simmons, to the Throne’s legend. Thirty years later, a new disappearance forces her to confront the night that changed both their lives. Memory, guilt, and superstition intertwine as Sosie learns that some stories never stop repeating.
Together, these stories trace the shifting boundary between belief and deceit, guilt and grief, and the ways people keep trying to make sense of what can’t be proved.
These stories all lead back to the night that began Portico’s legend.
Start with the novel that started series—The Witch’s Throne—or explore the stories that expand the world.
A Witch’s Curse. A Century of Unexplained Deaths.
Thea Drake never believed in curses. Her husband George, a professional skeptic, made a career exposing them—until his final investigation ended in tragedy. Now, newly widowed and desperate to protect her daughters, Thea wants to leave the supernatural behind.
But when George’s rival, psychic Beverly Donneville, claims he died as the seventh victim of the Witch’s Throne, Thea is forced to confront the one thing George never could: the possibility that the legend might be real. She returns to the old-growth forests of southern Oregon—back to the site of the Witch’s Throne—and is drawn into Portico’s dark history and a truth that could destroy what remains of her family.
The Witch’s Throne is where Portico’s legend begins—and no one who enters leaves unchanged.
The Witch’s Throne
The Next Mystery Awaits
The legend of The Witch’s Throne ends in Portico—but the mysteries continue elsewhere.
Each novel by Anderson Laatsch stands on its own, connected not by place but by the people who can’t stop chasing what lies beyond reason.
Next in the supernatural mystery series: Haunts of the Brethren—a new story set on a private island in the Caribbean, where history and belief once again blur into something deadly.