I was ten years old when my grandfather died. He died in his sleep during the cold February night with his rosary in his hands. My cousin had to break into the house on Sunday morning because Grampy never missed Mass and it was time to go.He found him under the covers, cold and still.  The doctor told my father that he had died peacefully, that he fell into a deep sleep and his heart slowed and then, eventually, it simply stopped. My father always said that he hoped that was how he would go - to fall asleep in one world and wake up in the next.  His was the second earliest death I ca ..read more

A ghost story is usually a solitary thing. It lives by itself and doesn’t go out much and by its nature, is solitary and lonesome. A ghost story is the hermit of tales because, so often, a spirit is only experienced by a single person, whether it be a chill in the air, a fleeting image in the darkness, a shadow in the window on the top floor as you casually  glance upward. Most people don’t see spirits in pairs or groups. They seem them when they’re all alone. It makes you wonder, if you’re an imbiber of such stories, if most of them might simply be creations of the mind, unintended tulpa ..read more

It looks like a small desk without any legs, just sitting there on a table, a well-fashioned rectangular wooden box containing within it a drawer that pulls out to reveal a crucifix, a journal, a spoon, bottle of white powder and sundry other items that, when attached to the device on top of the box, did something very special, or at least, that’s what was claimed. The device is symmetrical and in its center is a glass column surmounted by a small cast iron skull wearing a helmet and within the glass column one can glimpse a brass bell suspended on a chain. On either side of the glass column a ..read more

 There is a legend in the northeast of a man condemned to ride the storm for all eternity. When folks first started describing the man and his conveyance, he was always seen running just ahead of a fierce thunderstorm that appeared out of nowhere, in an open carriage being drawn by a fierce bay horse. Sitting next to him is his small daughter, perhaps no more than six years old. They are both soaking wet and their faces are both covered in panic and fear. The carriage is being driven at a frenetic pace for just behind this strange pair is a sky of tight rolling black thunderheads and the ..read more

When I was a young boy living in Caribou, Maine, back in the 1960s, we had two rocking chairs in our living room. I spent a lot of time in that room, playing with my Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars on the floor, building with my Lincoln Logs, and generally lost in sweet illusion. Life was sweet and completely innocent and I was the master of my own imagination. But something happened. Something I did a lot of the time, without thinking, has haunted me up to this day. It was something I knew nothing about, something that I couldn’t possibly have guessed.  You see, when I was lying there on th ..read more

You’ve heard a lot of stories about the old days in the deep woods of northern Maine, when river drivers cut the trees and moved the logs into the rivers, down the great waterways or through the dense frozen forest. In Maine’s early days as a state, most of it was a frontier, far removed from the rest of civilization and only connected with a thin line of rail or a dark ribbon of water weaving its way from the overwhelming forest to the towns and cities near the coast. When winter came and the ground froze solid, that’s when lumbermen ventured deep into the woods, so deep that the closest conn ..read more

[Please note – some of the descriptions in this article/episode are graphic. Use discretion with younger readers/listeners] You are lying in your bed on this hot July night. It has been a long, hot summer with no rain for weeks. The ground is turning to dust and the wind is warmer than usual. Outside, the light of moon is bright as it peeks between the curtains and if you are still, you can hear the rustle of the leaves and the peepers outside in the distance. You close your eyes again and know that soon, you will drift back to sleep. There are chores to do in the morning and it will come soon ..read more

When I was a boy, I used to hear the train in the distance in the middle of the night. It broke the stone silence of my world like a knife, a long, lonesome whistle from over the hill next to the Aroostook River Valley, where the tracks ran. It was a sign of life, the Bangor and Aroostook.  I never knew if it was headed north or south. I never saw the night train - I only ever heard its wail. It was reassuring. Even though my neck of the woods was lonely, there were train tracks connecting that loneliness to the wider world, somewhere out there.  I had never been on a train. My paren ..read more

When I was a boy, my father told me a story about a ghost town. I come from northern Maine, Aroostook County, a place of endless trees and potato fields with more deer than people. It's lonely country, a place of long, quiet, windswept vistas, of dark temples in the forest, of a world not yet destroyed by the endless march of human industry. Not yet. To be clear, I had heard my share of ghost stories - my sister had even seen the spirit of my grandmother standing at the foot of her bed, watching over her. I know because I awoke to her screaming. We lived with the idea of the Holy Ghost, t ..read more

I know you don’t tell other people that you’ve had that experience, that one singular time when you were alone in your house and it happened: something inexplicable. Maybe it was when your parents first thought you were old enough to be left alone without a babysitter and told you that they would only be out for a little while. You’d had the drill - don’t open the door to strangers, don’t try to use the stove, keep the door locked and just be good - everything would be okay and they would be back before you knew it. You remember, don’t you, that time? It was nighttime in the autumn and you wer ..read more