Gadabout Town: What’s in a Ghost Story?
We originally planned this issue for October 2024. So we asked some of our readers to tell us about their supernatural stories or superstitions. When the issue got pushed, we decided to stay with this prompt since ghosts are for all seasons.
Dana Harju, bookseller at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn
In 2016 I lived in a house with 9 bedrooms and 18 roommates in San Francisco. I shared a room with two girls and my bed was on the floor under a huge set of bay windows that overlooked the sidewalk, intersection of 28th and Santiago, and the ocean. We were on a hill in the lovely and gorgeous sunset district. I hung little curtains along the bottom half of the windows since otherwise my whole nook would be exposed to the sidewalk. Sometimes if I woke up as the sun was coming up I would peek out from behind the curtains to see the soft colors of the sunrise playing on the ocean and fog then go back to sleep. One morning I did so — 4 am? 5?— and there was a person outside. I was so shocked, she had to be no more than 5 feet away from me, standing in the street, not the sidewalk. There was no car parked between her and me. In the beautiful watercolor painting of the early morning she was wearing many ragged looking layers of black and gray and holding the flame of a lighter right in front of her face. I was spooked to my bones and ducked behind my little curtain; then since I was also immensely curious, I looked out in the next second and she was completely gone. I refuse to interpret this event and just accept that she is my ghost to remember.
Jeremy Gordon, author of See Friendship (out March 2025).
It is so beautiful and freeing to be unsure, the older I get. To allow for what might be my fundamental dumbness. I start reading articles and close them halfway through. I suggest that most books over 500 pages should be half that length; I suggest that most books could be novellas, actually. I sometimes wish that lobotomies were elective.
There was a time, long ago, when I would’ve brashly declared that ghosts were not real. Spirits, in general—no way. I was raised outside of the church, without fear or suspicion of the otherworld. Paranormal Activity, to me, was no more “found footage” than Return of the Jedi. To be fair, this was a subject I did not ponder much—“ghosts aren’t real” was as uncomplicatedly true as “don’t drink from the toilet.” Then life got its hooks in me, and pulled loose the tightly wound knot of my belief system. More and more, I thought to myself about all sorts of subjects: “Well, maybe.”
By the time I came to live by myself, in a Brooklyn apartment dating to the early 20th century, I was open-minded. Ready to believe. And when bizarre phenomena started to stack up, I amused myself by considering explanations beyond the corporeal. Was the intermittent rumbling beneath my floorboards just the subway—or not? Could the odd presence I sometimes felt before waking up only be undiagnosed sleep paralysis—or something else? Once, when my girlfriend woke up, she saw a hazy figure standing at the foot of our bed—and when she blinked, it was gone. Another time, I was wrenched out of a dream and possessed with the bone-chilling certainty that a presence was standing over me, just waiting for me to flip over. Thus instinct led me another way: Ghosts?
Possibly not. Yet allowing myself to consider ghosts was an admission of humility, when faced with the inexplicable. I do not attempt to “solve” magic tricks; I do not require “explainers” for Twin Peaks: The Return. I want to allow for the unknown, and that which cannot be diagnosed or diagrammed by the many practitioners of modern medicine. Under sworn oath, I wouldn’t insist that my old apartment was haunted. But I suppose I’d like to live in a world where the judge won’t force me to decide, one way or another, and maintain faith in that which cannot be clarified by logic alone.
Shy Watson, writer.
In the house where I grew up, our only bathroom was an afterthought. If sitting on the toilet, my right knee would hit the bathtub, and my left would hover inches from the sink’s exposed pipe. The bathroom was off the short hallway that separated my mother’s room from the dining room, and from the dining room there was a doorway that led to the kitchen.
I must have been fourteen by then because I was looking in the bathroom mirror, applying makeup when suddenly I felt that I was being watched. I looked from the bathroom toward the doorway that separated the dining room from the kitchen. Standing there was a tall man with rough dark hair in old, faded farming clothes. He was not translucent but absolutely solid. I froze in fear not knowing what to do. But when I blinked, he vanished. I stood there in the bathroom listening for footsteps but there were none.
When I eventually gathered the courage, I looked through the house then called my mom who, at the time, was still on the clock at Target. I told her I had seen a man. She asked me to describe him. After a pause, she laughed and said, “Oh honey, that’s just Ival Bumgardner, the man who built our house.”
Char McCutcheon, musician Bella (Mint Records), CHAR2D2, Jules & Charles
When I was three years old, growing up on the west coast of Canada, my mom put me in piano lessons. She said that I could sing before I could speak, so music was a constant in my life. My dad was often away from home for long stretches of time, as he was the captain of a tugboat on the Fraser River.
One day when I was around seven years old, I was doing my piano practice. The way that our upright piano was set up, the piano bench was beside a big bay window in the living room, one floor above street-level, overlooking an old cherry tree, huge juniper bush and the cul de sac sidewalk. It was mid-winter, around 6pm, already quite dark outside, when I had a strange sensation like I was being watched. I looked out the window from the bench and beside the juniper bush was the silhouette of a man in traditional fishermen garb, holding what seemed to be an oil-burning lantern, watching me. Silent. Still. I immediately dove off of the piano bench, ducked under cover of the window sill, then peeked my head up, hoping to get a better glimpse of this man who was watching me. But in a matter of seconds, he was gone. Outside, there was no one around. It was as if he had evaporated - I could see the empty sidewalk and sleepy neighboring houses in every direction. Even if he had run away, I would've been able to spot him from my bay window perch.
After that, I refused to practice with the curtains open. And I wondered what other apparitions might hitch a ride with my dad, on his way home from the river, lingering to listen to me practicing piano.