Not all ghosts can be laid to rest…
Whether you’re sitting around a campfire, or staying up late to read—you’ll eventually have to turn off the light, you know—you’ll love these fifteen tales of ghosts, haunted houses, and spooky goings-on!
Imagine waking every day in an old house, unable to leave the grounds because every time you do you get lost in the gray mist. What if the haunted section in the library was actually haunted? Seeing a ghost in a haunted house would be one thing…but what if it followed you home?
Step into the haunted worlds of the fifteen ghostly tales in Hauntings…if you dare!
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Hauntings is the first volume in The Haunted Anthology. Follow the series on Facebook to learn more!
The Stories
A young girl wakes every morning to find a note from her father in Travis Heermann’s “Daubs of Color.” She’s stuck in their old house, all alone, with endless gray sky and mist just beyond the hedgerows. Her only company is the many paintings which always change, as if someone comes during the night to replace them. The eyes of the people in the paintings watch her as she passes by.
The ghost of a 70s British rock god asks Nikki Ashburne, former Hollywood party girl who can now speak to ghosts, for help finding a song he wrote for his favorite groupie in “Communication Breakdown” by Dayle A. Dermatis. The only problem is she needs help from her musician brother, who doesn’t know about Nikki’s spectral ability.
In Jamie Ferguson’s “Haunted,” Jill is walking through an old, abandoned cabin in the mountains when she sees the ghost of a man who murdered his wife in 1893. Three days later he appears in Jill’s house: the ghost followed her home!
It’s the twenty-eighth birthday of the seventh son of a seventh son in Debbie Mumford’s “Seventh.” He is investigating a crime scene, and is startled when the dead woman speaks to him. The ghost helps him identify who killed her, but there’s no evidence…and now the murderer is after his next victim.
The tavern maid Blake dallied with killed herself—and her unborn child, who she claimed was his—in P.D. Cacek’s “The Lingering Scent of Apples.” He goes back to the tavern, which she now supposedly haunts, to make his peace with her family. But not all ghosts can be laid to rest.
Ellen Sugimori is afraid of ghosts, which is making it hard for her to write the ghost story due for her fifth-grade class, in “The Sugimori Sisters and the Haunting in the Library” by Brigid Collins. Her little sister decides to help Ellen by doing a scientific experiment to prove ghosts exist and that people can protect themselves from them. The girls head to the library and sneak into the Haunted section…which is, of course, actually haunted!
In Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Waltzing on a Dancer’s Grave,” Greta and her ballet company arrive at Grayson Place, and prepare for the company’s fiftieth-anniversary gala—but her memories haunt her. Karl Grayson died there twenty years earlier, and his death freed her once. Or did it?
Meredith has set up shop as a private detective in Rebecca M. Senese’s “Hanging On Letting Go,” but she’s not getting any clients until Priscilla, the ghost who only Meredith can see or hear, shows up with a case. Naturally, the client is also a ghost!
The Waverly Inn is one of the oldest hotels in Halifax, Nova Scotia in Steve Vernon’s “Lying in the Gutter, Gazing at the Stars.” The inn’s claim to fame is that Oscar Wilde haunts room 122…which is, of course, the only room available since the local blues festival has filled every other hotel in the area.
An angel made of tarnished concrete sits in the center of the cemetery in Jeff Wood’s “Gray Angel.” Years before, a young, pregnant woman died next to the statue and—according to the ghost stories—sometimes she appears…sad, weeping, and covered in blood. But those are just stories—she’s not real. Or is she?
In DeAnna Knippling’s “Nurse Kimberly Sits Vigil,” Wanda, Kimberly’s mother-in-law, is fading, and the only person she wants to see before she dies is Kimberly. At the urging of her sons—and the ghost of their father, who the kids are convinced still sits in his old chair—Kimberly heads to the nursing home in Atlanta, where she learns why Wanda wanted so badly for her to visit.
A young girl appears at Meredith’s grandfather’s funeral in Elaine Marie Carnegie-Padgett’s “The Haunting of Penelope,” but no one else sees the child. At first Meredith doesn’t know why the girl seems so familiar, then she remembers they played together when Meredith herself was very young, and didn’t realize Penelope was a ghost. Is there something Meredith can do to help the little ghost girl?
The high school Tiana and her friends attend has been transformed into a haunted house for Halloween in “Professor Polter In The Computer Lab With The Banshee,” by Tami Veldura. But it’s not just a haunted house—it’s also an interactive virtual reality game! The friends team up on their adventure, knowing the ghosts aren’t real…but what about the banshee?
In “Hoarding,” by Thea Hutcheson, the previous occupant of Selena’s house might have died, but he hadn’t gone, and he certainly hadn’t changed his ways as her belongings regularly disappeared. Dealing with a klepto ghost was annoying, but at least Selena had escaped her controlling, abusive boyfriend…or had she?
Carol haunts Bobby, her husband and murderer, as well as the new woman he’s seeing in Alicia Cay’s “At the Edge of the Well.” They can’t see, or hear, or touch Carol—she is not that kind of ghost. But in dreams, she can do many things.
Find Hauntings
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