I Saw a Ghost

They weren't looking for ghosts. They were just doing their jobs.

A baker shaping loaves at two in the morning. A diver on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. A census worker on a West Virginia porch. A corrections officer passing a cellblock that was sealed decades ago. They're ordinary people who know their workplaces down to the last detail, which is exactly why they notice when something doesn't belong.

In this third volume of the series, twenty-five first-person stories bring the unexplained into the most familiar places:

• an old man folding shirts in an all-night laundromat
• a soldier polishing his boots on fire watch, on a bunk that has no mattress
• a stranger who waits on a subway platform closed since the 1940s
• a woman on a Missouri election day, first in line before the polls open and still waiting when they close

Some of these ghosts never seem to notice the living. Others look back. A few seem to have one last piece of unfinished business.

From a Mojave homestead to the Grand Canyon's South Rim, and from 1957 to the present day, these stories are quiet, believable and hard to shake. Nobody screams, and no doors slam. It's just the moment when something ordinary turns out not to be.

Read them with the lights on, or don't. They happened to people who weren't afraid of the dark either.