Ghost stories are part of a special rite of passage for children young enough to have vivid visual imaginations, but not so young that the stories traumatize. My friend Jim introduced me to the baby grave on the St. Croix, the Down East river that separates Maine and New Brunswick. The old grave is on […]

“Dad, it’s out there again!” I sobbed. I had scurried from my bedroom to the kitchen, where my parents were engaged in a boisterous, cocktail-fueled game of pinochle with a couple of their closest friends. “Please, Dad, please. Make it go away.” Tears streamed down my cheeks. As a 6-year-old, I had no idea how […]

I’ve been hearing my name called since I was a kid, sharing a bedroom with Deb and Lisa. We would all be asleep, middle of the night. I would hear a woman’s voice, not my mother’s, call my name from the open bedroom door. “Jody.” Always the polite child, I woke right up and looked […]

There are more guests at the table than the hosts Invited; the illuminated hall Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts, As silent as the pictures on the wall. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Haunted Houses” When we bought our camp on Little Sebago Lake in 1996, it came furnished – comfortable musty furniture, cooking pots and […]

I’m a materialist, so I don’t believe in ghosts. I do, however, believe in ghost stories, and one of the best is Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” on par with Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw.” In these two stories, the emphasis is less on the supernatural and more on the psychological […]

Even now, years later, it happens. I can be walking on a familiar trail and I will look back to see if she is following me. Sometimes I think that I see her black form running jauntily in and out of the woods. Although I expect her to race up to greet me, I know […]

For 50 years, one ghostly memory has haunted me. I sometimes wonder if it ever happened at all. Yet, I know the killdeer in the field was real, and it was the killdeer’s nest that inspired me for the moment I am about to tell you about. I was 12. That summer my mother allowed […]

I see dead people.  The first sighting occurred while watching a Charlie Chaplin film made in 1915 when I realized every actor who came on the screen – everyone – was now dead but also now alive and spooling along in a grainy black and white digitized film.  The Tramp, dead.  His love interest, dead.  […]