One

“Doesn’t matter who you are or what you believe. Everybody hasa ghost story.”

My father said those words to me as a child whenever I would

question his life’s work. Scratch that. His life’s

obsession

.I came to learn that he was right. Everybody has had at leastone of those moments when their insides say something’s hap-

pening that’s far outside of normal. A fleeting second when some-

thing is seen moving out of the corner of their eye. A prick at theback of the neck alerting them to a presence. A location that forno discernible reason fills them with dread.

I had plenty of my own stories of ghosts and the paranormal.

As Maia Peters, daughter of the famous Malcolm and Carmen

Peters, it was to be expected. I thought I knew everything there

was to know about the paranormal. One warm night in New

York City, I found out just how wrong I was. A sign just inches from my face read “YOU WILL BE TERRI-

FIED” in a scrawled typeface. The words were blood red, splattered

in a sloppy fashion across a plank of rotted wood.I looked at the sign not with suspicion or doubt, just weari-ness. It was the third such sign to be thrust in my face since my

friends and I had stepped into the line. It might have seemed more

authentic had “Ghost Town

” not been printed in the bottom

right corner of the faux wood.

“There was always this one closet at my grandparents’ house

that gave me the creeps when I was growing up,” said Jill, rubbing

her gloved hands together both to keep warm and—I assumed—out of nervousness. “It was a linen closet in the bathroom at the

back of the house, and it was really dark inside. Whenever I looked

in there . . . I don’t know. It made me feel cold all over.” Jill had been my roommate at Columbia University for our

sophomore and junior years. For our senior year, I was paying

extra for solo on-campus housing.

Angela, meanwhile, was Jill’s best friend since high school.

She was similarly coifed with long, straight hair, and talked somuch like Jill that I often thought their brains were psychically linked. At Jill’s words, Angela shivered slightly but smiled. “I’ve

got one,” she said, glancing around to make sure none of the other

amusement park patrons in this line were listening too closely.

“When I was like nine or ten, sometimes my great-aunt would

pick me up after school and I’d stay at her house for a couple of

hours until my dad got off work. Her husband was this really

mean old guy who’d done all these awful, evil things to her, buthe died before I was born. She kept this old recliner in the house