CHARLOTTE TIERNEY: I was educated in an old Sisters of Mercy convent school, where rumors of ghost nuns were ten a penny and were never especially convincing. However, when I was fourteen, I was in a math class and the teacher walked past me to the back of the room—I heard the movement of her long skirts and felt the displacement of air. A moment later, I put up my hand and looked behind me for help, but the teacher was still sitting ahead of me at her desk in front of the class. The girl I sat with grabbed my arm and told me she had been sure the teacher had just passed us. Later on that day, girls from the same class had been telling people they’d seen a figure in the corner of the room when they’d left the class. Having said all that, I still don’t necessarily believe in ghosts, or math to be honest.
JEFFREY FORD: In south Jersey, 3:00 a.m., I couldn’t sleep. I put the dog on the leash and went over to the park. Sat in the gazebo and had a cigarette. The wind was blowing the trees like crazy. All of a sudden there was a guy in full Scottish regalia playing the bag pipes. The high hat, the kit, and everything. When he was done, he simply vanished. I didn’t see what happened to him.
KATHERINE CART: In Virginia, I lived for a couple years in an old mansion that had been haphazardly subdivided into twelve apartments. My apartment was on the second floor and the bedroom was actually a converted porch. The bed sat between two windows: the exterior, looking out onto the entry stairs, and the interior, which opened to the kitchen. I had a reoccurring dream in which I woke to a figure standing not outside the window looking in, but standing just behind the kitchen window, looking directly down on me. The figure was significantly masculine and angry. In the dream I was always awake, or I had missed the moment of waking, and I was full of a certainty that I had misplaced myself, I had wandered in somewhere uninvited; I was an intruder. I moved out once a neighbor’s toilet kept flooding my stove. About a year later, I was having dinner with a woman who had lived in a different apartment in the same building. I described that dream. She, unphased, said, “Oh yes, I had the same dream. A figure watching from across the room. But he was never mad in the dream. I was just always certain that I was an intruder and he did not know what to do with me.” Since then, I have often wondered most about our interpretations of the figure. I find myself assuming she must have missed the anger—it was so obvious, so loud.
TIMOTHY J. JARVIS: While editing my novel, The Wanderer, after completing a first draft, I came across a reference, in a work by Iain Sinclair, to a book by a writer called Walter Owen, ‘More Things in Heaven’…, a text made up of linked narratives about cursed manuscripts, manuscripts that cause readers to spontaneously combust, a work itself supposedly cursed. Intrigued by a resemblance between the description of this novel and the plot of my own book, and undeterred by claims of malign influence, I ordered up ‘More Things in Heaven’… at the British Library. On opening it, I felt an eerie shock. The first line of Owen’s work runs: “On the 14th July 1935 Mr. Cornelius Letherbotham, an English gentleman resident in Buenos Aires, died under extraordinary and distressing circumstances.” The first line of The Wanderer was (and is): “On the 18th December 2010, Simon Peterkin, a British Library archivist and writer of weird tales with a small if cultic following, disappeared from his Highgate flat.” I read on, gripped by a horrid fascination, and discovered more and more correspondences. I began dabbling, working more, this time intentional, allusions to ‘More Things in Heaven’… into my book. Then, on the block where I lived at the time, there was a bad fire. No one was hurt, but the building was gutted. I stopped tinkering after that.
PATRICIA SMITH:Yep. Just a couple of weeks ago. I was on an expressway with very little traffic, traveling in the middle lane. Saw a car behind me, pretty far away but coming up relatively fast. I decided to stay in the middle lane until it passed me. It got closer, closer—and when I wondered why it hadn’t passed me, I looked to see it wasn’t there. There were no exits between me and the place I first spotted it.
RYAN HABERMEYER: I dreamt my dead friend once. In the dream, I peered through a cabin window in the middle of the woods and my friend was in the room sitting on a chair, encircled by these floating entities in long black robes. His face was pale and rotting, the skin sort of hanging off. Then he looked right at me, and his face and my face sort of stretched across the room together like taffy, wrapping into a knot. I woke up freezing cold and felt my dead friend was in the room with me. I didn’t sleep for a week.
REGGIE OLIVER: I was present on several occasions when my friend Jill saw a ghost. One Sunday evening in 1976 we were walking along the promenade of Llandudno (a seaside town) when she suddenly turned to me and said she had been jostled by a man in black rags. I had seen nothing. He had been coming from a building where there lived a man who was intimately involved with a member of the theater company to which we both belonged. We found out the next day that at the very time that that strange apparition had pushed past Jill, the man in question had died of a heart seizure. This account I wrote down in my diary at the time and when, over forty-five years later, we compared notes about the incident, Jill confirmed it in every detail.
KATHRYN DAVIS: When my first husband and I moved to Vermont in 1969, we bought a white farmhouse in the town of South Woodbury that turned out to be inhabited by a ghost. We didn’t realize this right away, but our dogs didn’t like to go into the room that had been the original living room, and often people asked if someone was in that room when there was clearly no one there. The ghost moved things around but mostly stayed in the far corner; you could see something like a pillar of light that came to resemble a middle-aged man standing there, balding, sad faced, looking out the window at the back field. When I told the local historian about this, she showed me a picture of John Waite, the man who used to live in the house, and it was definitely him. According to her, John Waite’s young wife died in childbirth, and he never got over it. The parapsychologist Hans Holzer wanted to do a story on the house, but I didn’t like the idea.
JAMES MORROW: On a lark, in my twenties, I attended a séance. I brought my congenital skepticism to the gathering but also a resolve to be polite. I saw something: the ethereal, floating face of a presumed revenant. While this sensation probably traced to the power of suggestion, combined with mesmeric theatricality—shadows, candles, music, the medium’s breathy voice—I shall never be sure.
Do you have a ghost story from your hometown?
PAUL TREMBLAY: I’ll cheat and offer a tale from the town, Salem, that borders my hometown, Beverly. My father used to work at the old (built in the 1910s) Parker Brothers factory in downtown Salem. The company was sold to Hasbro in 1991, and the factory was demolished. The details of that haunt me more than any ghost story, but I digress. My father told me that a frightened older woman showed up at the factory in the dead of night, when he worked second shift. She had a beat-up Ouija board with her and begged my father to destroy the evil thing, that she tried to be rid of it and it kept coming back. As a kid, I thought he made up the story, but recently, at this birthday dinner, I asked him if he had been pulling my leg, and he’d said no, and added way more details about the woman, the time of night, where he was in the factory, etc.
TIMOTHY J. JARVIS: The town where I live, Bedford in the UK, is most famous for its link to John Bunyan, the mystic tinker who wrote the great vision quest, The Pilgrim’s Progress here. But its strangest connection has to do with a sect founded here in the early twentieth-century, the Panacea Society, who believed (at least partly seriously) the town to be on the site of the Garden of Eden. At some point they came into possession of a sealed casket of prophecies written by a visionary of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Joanna Southcott, said to contain foretellings of the Day of Judgment. Southcott left instructions this box could only be opened in the presence of all twenty-four Bishops of the Church of England, and the Society spent a great deal of effort, and some of the funds raised by donations made by followers around the world who’d been sent their “panacea” or healing cure, in petitioning the Bishops. But the last member of the society died in 2012, and the box remains unopened. Who knows what dread revelations it contains?
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES: Stanton, Texas, had this derelict old convent, yeah. It was spooky. We’d sneak around it at night, scare ourselves. One of the best jumpscares I ever had was there, when a high schooler—I was in junior high—jack-in-the-box’d up from behind a headstone. Dude was six and a half feet tall and pale as could be, but, that night, he was taller, he was paler.
KATHERINE CART: My hometown, Hallowell, Maine, always felt a little haunted. Down the road and across the river, there was an abandoned complex of eighteenth-century stone buildings, the Augusta Mental Health Institute, where many people had suffered over the years. There was a lot of memory caught up in that granite. We liked to break in there in high school, never to party, simply to get scared.
TIMOTHY J. JARVIS: The town where I live, Bedford in the UK, is most famous for its link to John Bunyan, the mystic tinker who wrote the great vision quest, The Pilgrim’s Progress here. But its strangest connection has to do with a sect founded here in the early twentieth-century, the Panacea Society, who believed (at least partly seriously) the town to be on the site of the Garden of Eden. At some point they came into possession of a sealed casket of prophecies written by a visionary of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Joanna Southcott, said to contain foretellings of the Day of Judgment. Southcott left instructions this box could only be opened in the presence of all twenty-four Bishops of the Church of England, and the Society spent a great deal of effort, and some of the funds raised by donations made by followers around the world who’d been sent their “panacea” or healing cure, in petitioning the Bishops. But the last member of the society died in 2012, and the box remains unopened. Who knows what dread revelations it contains?
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES: Stanton, Texas, had this derelict old convent, yeah. It was spooky. We’d sneak around it at night, scare ourselves. One of the best jumpscares I ever had was there, when a high schooler—I was in junior high—jack-in-the-box’d up from behind a headstone. Dude was six and a half feet tall and pale as could be, but, that night, he was taller, he was paler.
KATHERINE CART: My hometown, Hallowell, Maine, always felt a little haunted. Down the road and across the river, there was an abandoned complex of eighteenth-century stone buildings, the Augusta Mental Health Institute, where many people had suffered over the years. There was a lot of memory caught up in that granite. We liked to break in there in high school, never to party, simply to get scared.
Where is the most haunted-feeling place you’ve ever been?
RYAN HABERMEYER: Frisco, Utah. An old silver mining ghost town in the middle of the desert. I visited there with my daughter last year. There was nobody around, absolutely nobody. Just this dead, quiet air. We were walking through the rubble of old buildings and beehive charcoal kilns when we heard children laughing and giggling. Very distinct. Both my daughter and I heard it. She said, “It’s two little girls laughing.” Later, we walked through the graveyard and there were multiple tombstones of young girls who were buried there. Very creepy.
ERIN MACNAIR: A bomb shelter in a friend’s basement at a house party. Something evil was in that basement, and the secret back room had creepy vibes. My friend felt it before I did. He said, “Bad things have happened here.” We didn’t stay long.
JAMES MORROW: The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. Sara Winchester allegedly created this labyrinthine mansion, with its interior walls that converge on themselves and stairs that terminate in ceilings, to confuse the vengeful ghosts of people killed by her late husband’s invention, the Winchester repeating rifle. When I toured the place in 1973, I projected my affection for “The Fall of the House of Usher” onto the anomalies and became agreeably disoriented.
VALERIE MARTIN: The crypt of St. Francis in Assisi. A cowled monk was kneeling before the saint’s sarcophagus, and a force field of icy air poured out from him. I was with my daughter, and we held hands as we backed away.
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES: An old falling down house way out in the middle of a pasture, when I was about twelve. Pretty sure someone who’d escaped from prison had been staying there for a season or so. All the walls were covered in the finest floor plans of a prison—very detailed stuff. I dug in this house’s old trash pile for the afternoon, looking for the little bottles from The Depression I used to like. And then I found, out by where a gate had been, a bottle of aftershave, unopened. Because this felt like a test, like a ritual, I drank it, so nothing would follow me home from this house.
ERIN MACNAIR: A bomb shelter in a friend’s basement at a house party. Something evil was in that basement, and the secret back room had creepy vibes. My friend felt it before I did. He said, “Bad things have happened here.” We didn’t stay long.
JAMES MORROW: The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. Sara Winchester allegedly created this labyrinthine mansion, with its interior walls that converge on themselves and stairs that terminate in ceilings, to confuse the vengeful ghosts of people killed by her late husband’s invention, the Winchester repeating rifle. When I toured the place in 1973, I projected my affection for “The Fall of the House of Usher” onto the anomalies and became agreeably disoriented.
VALERIE MARTIN: The crypt of St. Francis in Assisi. A cowled monk was kneeling before the saint’s sarcophagus, and a force field of icy air poured out from him. I was with my daughter, and we held hands as we backed away.
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES: An old falling down house way out in the middle of a pasture, when I was about twelve. Pretty sure someone who’d escaped from prison had been staying there for a season or so. All the walls were covered in the finest floor plans of a prison—very detailed stuff. I dug in this house’s old trash pile for the afternoon, looking for the little bottles from The Depression I used to like. And then I found, out by where a gate had been, a bottle of aftershave, unopened. Because this felt like a test, like a ritual, I drank it, so nothing would follow me home from this house.