Short Rural Ghost Stories

Most ghosts in this world dare not take the main roads. They hide in the beams of ancestral homes, in the reflections of dry wells, or in the mass graveyard you passed every day on your way home from school as a child. The ghosts in my stories don't wear suits. They are old women in funeral shrouds who light lamps at midnight to “call back” the souls of everyone in the village. They aren't caught up in affairs of the heart. They are women drowned in ponds who, on the anniversary of their deaths each year, make the fish in the water turn belly-up. And they don't come with horror-movie special effects. They are blind storytellers plucking a three-stringed instrument, singing in the local dialect of the sins committed by a family's ancestors. I write about ghosts, but what I see is people: forgotten customs, buried grievances, and goodness and evil held in contempt all rise from the dead in this land. If you're brave enough, open this collection of Rural Ghost Stories and listen to them all. You'll discover that the human heart is far more frightening than any ghost.