The woman is a mound of dirt and rags pushing a squeaky shopping cart; a lump that moves steadily, slowly forward, as if dragged by an invisible tide. Her long, greasy hair hides her face but Ramon feels her staring at him.

He looks ahead. The best thing to do with the homeless mob littering Vancouver is to ignore it. Give them a buck and the beggars cling to you like barnacles.

“Have you seen my children?” the woman asks.

Her voice, sandpaper against his ears, makes him shiver. His heart jolts as though someone has pricked it with a needle. He keeps on walking, but much faster now. It isn’t until he is shoving the milk inside the fridge that he realizes why the woman’s words have upset him: she reminds him of the Llorona.

He hasn’t thought about her in years, not since he was a child living in Potrero.

Everyone in town had a story about the Llorona. The most common tale was that she drowned her children in the river and afterwards roamed the town, searching for them at night; her pitiful cries are a warning and an omen.

Camilo, Ramon’s great-uncle, swore on his mother’s grave that he met this ghost while riding home one night. It was the rainy season, when the rivers overflow and Camilo was forced to take a secondary, unfamiliar road.

He spotted a woman in white bending over some nopales at the side of a lonely path. Her face was covered with the spines of the prickly pears she had savagely bitten. She turned around and smiled. Blood dripped from her open mouth and stained her white shift.

This was the kind of story the locals whispered around Potrero. It was utter nonsense, especially coming from the lips of a chronic alcoholic like Camilo, but it was explosive stuff for an eight-year old boy who stayed up late to watch black-and-white horror flicks on the battered TV set.

However, to think about the Llorona there in the middle of the city between the SkyTrain tracks and a pawn shop is ridiculous. Ramon never packed ghost stories in his suitcase, and Potrero and the Llorona are very far away.

• • • •

He sees the homeless woman sitting beneath a narrow ledge, shielding herself from the rain. She weeps and hugs a plastic bag as though it were a newborn.

“Have you seen my children?” she asks when he rushes by, clutching his umbrella.

Nearby a man sleeps in front of an abandoned store, an ugly old dog curled next to him. The downtown homeless peek at Ramon from the shadows as he steps over old cigarette butts.

They say this is an up and coming neighborhood but each day he spots a new beggar wielding an empty paper cup at his face.

It is disgraceful.

This is the very reason why he left Mexico. He escaped the stinking misery of his childhood and the tiny bedroom with the black-and-white TV set he had to share with his cousins.

Behind his house there were prickly pears and emptiness. No roads, and no buildings. Just a barren nothing swallowed by the purple horizon. It was easy to believe that the Llorona roamed there.

But not in Vancouver which is new and shiny, foaming with lattes and tiny condos.

• • • •

The dogs are howling. They scare him. Wild, stray animals that roam the back of the house at nights. His uncle told him the dogs howled when they saw the Llorona. Ramon runs to the girls’ room and sneaks into his mother’s bed, terrified of the noise and his mother has to hold him in her arms until he falls asleep.

But when he wakes up Ramon is in his apartment and it is only one dog, the neighbor’s Doberman, barking.

He rolls to the centre of the bed, staring at the ceiling.

• • • •

Ramon spots the woman a week later, her arms wrapped around her knees.

“My children,” she asks, with her cloud of dirty hair obscuring her face. “Where are my children?”

Nauseating in her madness, a disgusting sight growing like a canker sore and invading his streets. Just like the other homeless littering the area: the man in front of the drugstore that always asks him for spare change even though Ramon never gives him any, or the gnarled man beneath a familiar blanket, eternally sleeping in the shade of the burger joint.

The city is heading to the gutter. Sure, it looks pretty from afar with its tall glass buildings and its mountains, but below there is a depressing stew of junkies and panhandlers that mars the view. It reminds him of Potrero and the bedroom with the leaky ceiling. He stared at that small yellow leak which grew to become an obscene, dark patch above his bed until one day he grabbed his things and headed north.

He felt like repeating his youthful impulsiveness, gathering his belongings in a duffel bag and leaving the grey skies of Vancouver. But he had the condo which would fetch a killing one day if he was patient, his job, and all the other anchors that a man pushing forty can accumulate. A few years before, maybe. Now it seemed like a colossal waste of time.

Ramon tries to comfort himself with the thought that one day when he retires he will move to a tropical island of pristine white beaches and blue-green seas where the wrecks of humanity can never wash ashore.

• • • •

He’s gone to buy groceries and there she is, picking cans out of the garbage in the alley behind the supermarket.

Llorona.

He used to send a postcard to his mother every year when he was younger, newly arrived in the States. He couldn’t send any money because dishwashing didn’t leave you with many spare dollars and he couldn’t phone often because he rented a room in a house and there was no phone jack in there. If he wanted to make a call he had to use the pay phone across the street.

Instead, he sent postcards.

Carmen didn’t like it.

His sister complained about his lack of financial support for their mother.

“Why do I have to take care of mom, hu? Why is it me stuck in the house with her?” she asked him.

“Don’t be melodramatic. You like living with mom.”

“You’re off in California and never send a God damn cent.”

“It ain’t easy.”

“It ain’t easy here either, Ramon. You’re just like all the other shitty men. Just taking off and leaving the land and the women behind. Who’s gonna take care of mom when she gets old and sick? Whose gonna clean the house and dust it then? With what fucking money? I ain’t doing it, Ramon.”

“Bye, Carmen.”

“There’s some things you can’t get rid of, Ramon,” his sister yelled.

He didn’t call after that. Soon he was heading to another city and by the time he reached Canada he didn’t bother sending postcards. He figured he would, one day, but things got in the way and years later he thought it would be even worse if he tried to phone.

And what would they talk about now? It had been ages since he’d left home and the sister and cousins that had lived in Potrero. He’d gotten rid of layers and layers of the old Ramon, moulting into a new man.

But maybe Carmen had been right. Maybe there’s some things you can’t get rid of. Certain memories, certain stories, certain fears that cling to the skin like old scars.

These things follow you.

Maybe ghosts can follow you, too.

• • • •

It’s a bad afternoon. Assholes at work and in the streets. And then a heavy, disgusting rain pours down, almost a sludge that swallows the sidewalks. He’s lost his umbrella and walks with his hands jammed inside his jacket’s pockets, head down.

Four more blocks and he’ll be home.

That’s when Ramon hears the squeal. A high-pitched noise. It’s a shriek, a moan, a sound he’s never heard before.

What the hell is that?

He turns and looks and it is the old woman, the one he’s nicknamed Llorona, pushing her shopping cart.

Squeak, squeak, goes the cart, matching each of his steps. Squeak, squeak. A metallic chirping echoed by a low mumble.

“Children, children, children.”

Squeak, squeak, squeak. A metallic chant with an old rhythm.

He walks faster. The cart matches his pace; wheels roll.

He doubles his efforts, hurrying to cross the street before the light changes. The cart groans, closer than before, nipping at his heels.

He thinks she is about to hit him with the damn thing and then all of a sudden the sound stops.

He looks over his shoulder. The old woman is gone. She has veered into an alley, vanishing behind a large dumpster.

Ramon runs home.

• • • •

The dogs are howling again. A howl that is a wail. The wind roars like a demon. The rain scratches the windows, begging to be let in, and he lies under the covers, terrified.

He feels his mother’s arm around his body, her hands smoothing his hair like she did when he was scared. Just a little boy terrified of the phantoms that wander through the plains.

His mother’s hand pats his own.

Mother’s hand is bony. Gnarled, long fingers with filthy nails. Nails caked with dirt. The smells of mud, putrid garbage, and mold hit him hard.

He looks at his mother and her hair is a tangle of grey. Her yellow smile paints the dark.

He leaps from the bed. When he hits the floor he realizes the room is filled with at least three inches of water.

“Have you seen my children?” the thing in the bed asks.

The dogs howl and he wakes up, his face buried in the pillow.

• • • •

He takes a cab to work. He feels safer that way. The streets are her domain, she owns the alleys.

When he goes to lunch he looks at the puddles and thinks about babies drowned in the water; corpses floating down a silver river.

Don’t ever let the Llorona look at you, his uncle said. Once she’s seen you she’ll follow you home and haunt you to death, little boy.

“Oh, my children,” she’ll scream and drag you into the river.

But he’d left her behind in Potrero.

He thought he’d left her behind.

• • • •

Ramon tries to recall if there is a charm or remedy against the evil spirit. His uncle never mentioned one. The only cure he knew was his mother’s embrace.

“There, there little one,” she said, and he nested safe against her while the river overflowed and lightning traced snakes in the sky.

• • • •

In the morning there is a patch of sunlight. Ramon dares to walk a few blocks. But even without the rain the city feels washed out. Its colour has been drained. It resembles the monochromatic images they broadcasted on the cheap television set of his youth.

Even though he does not bump into her, the Llorona’s presence lays thick over the streets, pieces of darkness clinging to the walls and the dumpsters in the alleys. It even seems to spread over the people: the glassy eyes of a binner reflect a river instead of the bricks of a building.

He hurries back home and locks the door. But when it rains again, water leaks into the living room. Just a few little drops drifting into his apartment.

He wipes the floor clean. More water seeps in like a festering boil, cut open and oozing disease.

• • • •

The Llorona stands guard in the alley. She is a lump in the night looking up at his apartment window. He feels her through the concrete walls and the glass. Looking for him.

He fishes for the old notebook with the smudged and forgotten number.

The rain splashes against his building and the wind cries like a woman.

The dial tone is loud against his ear.

More than ten years have passed. He has no idea what he’ll say. He doesn’t even understand what he wants to ask. He can’t politely request to ship the ghost back to Mexico.

He dials.

The number has been disconnected.

He thinks about Carmen and his mother and the dusty nothingness behind their house.

There might not even be a house. Perhaps the night and the river swallowed them.

• • • •

The Llorona comes with the rain. Or maybe it is the other way around: the rain comes with her. Something else also comes. Darkness. His apartment grows dimmer. He remains in the pools of light, away from the blackness.

Outside, in the alley, the Llorona scratches the dumpster with her nails.

The dogs howl.

Ramon shivers in his bed and thinks about his mother and how she used to drive the ghosts away.

• • • •

She is sitting next to a heap of garbage in the middle of the alley, water pouring down her shoulders. She clutches rags and dirt and pieces of plastic against her chest, her head bowed and her face hidden behind the screen of her hair.

“My children. My children.”

She looks up at him, slowly. The rain coats her face, tracing dirty rivulets along her cheeks.

He expects an image out of a nightmare: blood dripping, yellow cat-eyes or a worn skull. But this is an old woman. Her skin has been torn by time and her eyes are cloudy. This is an old woman.

She could be his mother. She might be, for all he knows. He lost her photograph a long time ago and can’t recall what she looks like anymore. His mother who ran her fingers through his hair and hugged him until the ghosts vanished. Now he’s too old for ghosts, but the ghosts still come at nights.

The woman looks at him. Parched, forgotten, and afraid.

“I’ve lost my children,” she whispers with her voice of dead leaves.

The alley is a river. He goes to her, sinks into the muck, sinks into the silvery water. He embraces her and she strokes his hair. The sky above is black and white, like the pictures in the old TV set and the wind that howls in his ears is the demon wind of his childhood.

#733

In one of the last pictures I am running. I am running down the street and it is dark, the street lamps are dim and the light oozes down sickly and yellow. I can feel my heart almost bursting in my chest, the taste of something sour and unpleasant in my mouth. I’m running as fast as I can. I have to get away.

The moon is a sickle moon. Its cheek is pockmarked with acne scars. It looks down on me; it hangs overhead like a malformed knife. They’re running behind me and they’re gaining. They’re not even running hard. They spread out around me, they match their pace to mine, easily, without effort. They whisper my name: Ellie, Ellie. Just ahead is the rusty iron gate to the old playground. I used to play on the swings when I was a little girl. They crowd me here. I don’t know if kids still use the swings. I stumble through the gate and into the playground. I just have to keep running but I take a picture then, I can’t help it, I take a picture and it’s just me and the gate and that sickle moon, and no one at all behind me.

“I heard this story about a girl who went mad a few months ago.”

“What girl?”

“Her name was Ellie and she was in my year at school. I didn’t see much of her after that until they found her dead at the bottom of the old playground down my street one night, a few months ago.”

“Oh, I’m really sorry.”

“It’s all right, I really didn’t know her that well. What was funny was, when I saw her, it was only for a moment before they zipped up the bag and took her away. It was her face, see. It was the scariest thing I ever saw, her face. Here, look. Just before they zipped her up I took a photo. Look.”

“. . . That’s disgusting!”

“I didn’t put it on Facebook or anything.”

“Are those eyes?”

“. . .”

“What is she doing with her mouth?”

“I think she’s screaming. She was still holding her phone when they found her, even though she was broken up pretty bad. My cousin Dan works in the lab and he said there were thousands of pictures on her phone. Thousands and thousands.”

“. . .”

“He said the police could construct her last few months almost moment by moment following the pictures. They were mostly selfies. But some of them were pretty weird. Dan said maybe someone Photoshopped them. After a while they didn’t even make sense.”

“That’s pretty vain, though.”

“I guess.”

“. . .”

“You know what the really weird thing was, though?”

“What?”

“A couple of days later I was in the supermarket and I thought I saw her. She was standing in the aisle by the cereal shelves and she was talking on her phone. She was holding a box of Crunchy Nuts. I had this really queasy feeling when I saw her. I mean it couldn’t be her, right? Then it was, like, she knew I was standing there and she turned and she gave me this smile. She had these uneven white teeth and she had her hair in this sort of fringe. She used to be really pretty. But when she turned she looked directly at me and it was her eyes. They were like eggshells, without pupils or an iris, they were just entirely white and empty and flat and she smiled.”

“You’re making it up.”

“I had a can of Coke in my hand and it fell down and burst open, and there was a mess. When I looked up again she’d disappeared.”

“Did you pay for the Coke?”

“Yeah, I paid for the Coke. They buried her a few days later. I didn’t go to the funeral. I mean, like I said, I never really knew her all that well, anyway.”

#1

This is right after I buy the phone. The shop behind me has a sign that says previously owned. I don’t know if that is its name or just a description, but it is accurate all the same. I’d gone to the mall, just browsing. At the back of the lower level, all the way back, the shops turn dusty and dark. There’s a baby clothes store that hasn’t seen a baby in years, and a shop for vegan supplies, and a video store that’s permanently shut. I’d not noticed this particular shop before. I go in and it’s filled with strange objects and all sorts of knickknacks, weird clockwork devices and creepy voodoo dolls and paintings of grotesque creatures like something on the cover of a paperback. At first I don’t see anyone in the shop but then I hear a cough and this weird old guy with a long, horse-like face and pale watery eyes, appears behind the counter, almost like he’d just been somehow cut out of the shadows and given form and pushed into the light, and he coughs again and says, “Can I help you, miss?”

I say, “I’m just browsing,” and I see his face frown in displeasure and it makes me feel uncomfortable.

“You’re very pretty,” he says suddenly, and I think I blush, and I shrug a little awkwardly. “No, no, really,” he says.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Here,” he says. He brings something out from behind the counter and it’s so startling in the shop among all the old and dusty objects: it’s a brand new phone. “Do you have one?” he says.

“A phone?”

“A phone like this one.”

“No, no,” I say. “I just have this old thing.”

“Then take this one,” he says. “From me.”

“You mean, for free?”

“No,” he says, and looks at me like I’m dim. “Of course not. I don’t run a charity here.”

“Oh. I mean . . .”

“Very cheap,” he says, and he pushes the phone at me aggressively. “Take it. Take it!”

He scares me so I take it but as soon as I hold the phone I feel better. It feels so smooth and warm, and it fits snugly into my palm. I swipe across the screen and the icons blink back at me. I barely hear that awful man when he says the price and like in a dream I take out some money and give it to him. He said I was pretty but I guess I never thought of myself as pretty. I mean, I didn’t give it much thought one way or another. I step out of the shop and suddenly there is light around me, and air. My finger itches. I hold up the phone in front of me and press the camera button and it’s like something in me wakes up for the first time and something inside me dies—I can’t describe it. I don’t need to. I press the button and there’s the image, instead.

#736

In the last picture, I’m dead.

#112

Funny thing is, I go back to the spot where the shop was a few days later and there is no sign of it. Here’s me standing with a Cinnabon behind me and the guy behind the counter said it’s been there for the past year. In the picture I’m biting my lip and looking worried. I had to keep clicking. I had to keep taking pictures, but the pictures were beginning to lie.

#447

“That was amazing, Ellie!” Noah says. He looks hopped up or something. He gives me this beaming smile.

I say, “What are you talking about?”

I snap a picture. Me standing there looking vaguely irritated, in his kitchen. He has petunias on the windowsill. I don’t like the way the light catches them. They look ill, and the sunlight is all blotchy.

“Last night! You were amazing!” Noah says. “I never even . . .” he blushes. “Where did you learn to do that?” he whispers. Comes close and puts his arms around me, and I can smell him, the smell of sweat and sex. And I push him away, and I can feel the tears coming, even though I don’t want them to, and I say, “But I wasn’t here last night, Noah, don’t you remember, I went to the movies with Shelly and I stayed at her place,” and he says, “What?” and his hands drop to his sides and then he smiles and says, “You’re just fucking with me,” and I burst into tears and he stands there looking confused and then angry, and he comes to me again and I push him away and I run up the stairs to his bedroom and see the rumpled sheets and, pinned to the mirror, a photo, it must have been taken last night and freshly-printed, and I am posing for the camera, *****, one hand held suggestively between my thighs while the other is out of sight, holding the camera. In the picture I am grinning into the camera and my teeth are a predator’s teeth and my eyes are—but there is nothing in my eyes. And I pull the photo from the mirror and I tear it up, into tiny pieces that fall to the floor at my feet.

#73

Dinner with Mum and Dad and Noah. We’re all smiling. Noah has his arm around me and he’s grinning stupidly into the camera and so am I. I’m feeling like there’s a fire inside me, burning from the inside out, like light falling on a negative, and it’s reaching everywhere, it’s touching everything with light.

#501

Me in front of the mirror, but the picture is all wrong. This is after I left Noah’s place and gone home. I’m crying as I press the button, but the me in the mirror is smiling.

#210

This photo’s a little blurry because I’m running. I’m on the street and a man is pursuing me.

#209

Blurry as I turn away from the man, who’s still speaking.

#208

He has a nervous excited voice and he keeps shouting about my phone. We’re both caught in the photo and for a moment his face is both almost erotically excited and incredibly terrified.

#207

A man approaches me in the street but he’s not in the photo. He wants to buy my phone. I can’t really understand what he’s saying. He is tall and thin with a straggly beard and he smells as though he hasn’t washed for a few days. He says his name is Farnsworth and that he’s a collector. He keeps asking me where I got my phone and do I know what it is. I tell him it’s just a phone but he doesn’t really listen. He says something about mimic objects, and parasite mechanics, and things that look like other things.

Dark chamber, he keeps saying, dark chamber, a camera obscura. I don’t know what any of it means. I start to turn away from him. I think, from the corner of my eye, I catch my reflection, standing on the street corner, only there is no mirror there.

#600

There is someone standing outside my house under the streetlamp but I don’t dare look.

It’s so quiet. It’s so quiet and nothing moves. Nothing moves but I know it’s there. The silence is like a living thing or the echo of living things. It’s like a dark chamber in my room and the only illumination comes from outside. The light presses against the curtains.

Something is standing outside under the lamp.

I pull back the corner of the curtain and I don’t look out but I take a picture.

In the picture something with my face is standing outside and it’s looking back at me and it’s smiling.

#342

Someone had slipped an envelope under my door in the night and when I open it I find a piece of paper inside torn from a book. I’m holding it up next to my face. My eyes are puffy. You can just about make out the letters. It says:

The mad Jesuit, Father Alfonse, in his 16th century manuscript, Umbra Autem Ex Tempore, first wrote of the curious properties of acertain kind of light, or rather shadow, or shadows—it is unclear in view of sometimes contradictory translations. He wrote the manuscript while incarcerated in a monastery in the bogs of Scotland, where he was held for blasphemy for some several years. In it, he describes a device which he claimed to have constructed, a sort of optical instrument or camera obscura, that is to say, a dark chamber, for the capture of such anti-light or shadows, or possibly, in some translations, notably the French Géroux Manuscript of 1653, a soul.

The mad Jesuit committed suicide—or perhaps was killed, the record is obscure—by falling from the top of the monastery to the bogs down below. How he made his way from the stout walls of the cellars that imprisoned him to the top, undetected, is unclear, nor was there any sign of the device found after his death. Though he himself was eventually found and buried, for many months afterwards local peasants reported the unsettling sight of a man answering Father Alfonse’s description being seen far and wide, sometimes in the midst of night and sometimes, plainly, in the height of day. But the figure never spoke or, if it had, none had recorded its words.

I don’t know what it means; it’s gibberish.

#655

It’s blurry because my hand is shaking so much and you can’t make out anything.

#415

Farnsworth again. I point the phone at him and he shrieks and runs away before I can take his picture so I take mine instead.

#416

And another.

#417

And another.

#418

And another and with each one I feel better and worse like I am being cut up into a lot of tiny little pieces like bits of me are lost like there is me and me and me and me and another.

#12

Standing in the park in the sunshine with my new phone and I’m so happy and everything is going to be all right.

#469

Me with a crying face. Dark. I have red eyes. It’s night and I’ve just been woken. Farnsworth is outside shouting. An ikiry? is a spirit torn from your soul by a curse, who now lives independently.

In some cultures they believe that every photo takes away a little bit of your soul.

“I’ll pay you anything!” he says. I can hear a dog barking. “Give it to me!” His voice is so lonely and so desperate. Then the dog stops barking suddenly and Farnsworth gives a high-pitched shriek. I don’t have to look outside to see what he sees.

#652

Outside the supermarket.

#653

I go into the supermarket and I bump into another customer and I mumble, “Sorry,” and then when I look just for a moment she looks back at me and she smiles with my face.

#654

My hand is shaking. A shot of me against supermarket shelves. Shoppers pushing carts loaded with food and cans and cereal. One by one they stop and raise their heads and look up at me. They smile with my face. They have no eyes.

Someone whispers my name: Ellie, Ellie.

I run.

#729

In one of the last pictures I’m running. The road spreads out ahead of me, and the sleeping suburban homes. The moonlight is sucked into the asphalt. I run, the only sound the beating of blood in my head. The air is scented with jasmine. Ahead of me is the old playground where we used to play. I don’t look back when I take the picture, but I know they’re there.

NUN CHUCKS

Michelle Froelick Young had a strange experience with her two year old daughter, submitted to Movie Pilot:

“When my daughter was 2, I found her twirling paper towel tubes, tied with twine, in the air. I asked her what she was doing. She said she was practicing her “nun chucks”. I was very confused as she’d have no way of knowing what they were. I asked her what she meant and she said that Adam had told her how to make them and showed her each night how to use them. She went on to say that Adam told her to practice because she may need to know how to defend herself someday. I almost freaked out, but asked her what Adam looked like. She said he was tall, blond, and had blue eyes. She said,”Mommy, you KNOW how he looks – you know him! He died of a headache.” I had to leave the room.You see, 4 months before she was born, my tall, blonde, blue eyed, martial arts-pro friend had died of a brain aneurysm at the age of 27. She has not spoken of him since that day, so I’m not sure if I scared her with my reaction or if she had completed her lessons.”

THE PUPPY IN THE BASEMENT

“Mommy told me never to go in the basement, but I wanted to see what was making that noise. It kind of sounded like a puppy, and I wanted to see the puppy, so I opened the basement door and tiptoed down a bit. I didn’t see a puppy, and then Mommy yanked me out of the basement and yelled at me. Mommy had never yelled at me before, and it made me sad and I cried. Then Mommy told me never to go into the basement again, and she gave me a cookie. That made me feel better, so I didn’t ask her why the boy in the basement was making noises like a puppy, or why he had no hands or feet.”

THERE'S SOMEONE UNDER THE BED

the story of a father putting his young son to bed:

“I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy, check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy, there’s somebody on my bed.”

THE CHAIR

“When my sister Betsy and I were kids, our family lived for awhile in a charming old farmhouse. We loved exploring its dusty corners and climbing the apple tree in the backyard. But our favorite thing was the ghost. We called her Mother, because she seemed so kind and nurturing. Some mornings Betsy and I would wake up, and on each of our nightstands, we’d find a cup that hadn’t been there the night before. Mother had left them there, worried that we’d get thirsty during the night. She just wanted to take care of us. Among the homes’ original furnishings was an antique wooden chair which we kept against the back wall of the living room. Whenever we were preoccupied, watching TV or playing a game, Mother would inch that chair forward, across the room, toward us. Sometimes she’d manage to move it all the way to the centre of the room. We always felt sad putting it back against the wall. Mother just wanted to be near us. Years later, long after we’d moved out, I found an old newspaper article about the farmhouse’s original occupant, a widow. She’d murdered her two children by giving them each a cup of poisoned milk before bed. Then she hung herself. The article included a photo of the farmhouse’s living room, with a woman’s body hanging from a beam. Beneath her, knocked over, was that old wooden chair, placed exactly in the center of the room.”

…Did it get colder in here, or is it just me?

THE GHOST AT THE HOME

“Last night a friend rushed me out of the house to catch the opening act at a local bar’s music night. After a few drinks I realized my phone wasn’t in my pocket. I checked the table we were sitting at, the bar, the bathrooms, and after no luck I used my friend’s phone to call mine. After two rings someone answered, gave out a low raspy giggle, and hung up. They didn’t answer again. I eventually gave it up as a lost cause and headed home. I found my phone laying on my nightstand, right where I left it.”