Chapter 1

With her heavy bag of sleepover supplies, Trista stood out in the bustle of Halloween prep that filled the dorm lobby. She smiled greetings to a few people she knew (not so many, just two months into her freshman year at Penn State Haggerton) and edged past a troupe of partygoers coming in with their late-bought costumes tucked into bulging Wal-Mart bags. Slipping out the front door into the chilly evening air, she let the silence wrap her up with a sigh.

A cool wind was hissing through the trees, rattling the last few leaves of the season, and the sky was fading into an amber sunset. She felt the melancholy satisfaction she always did at seeing the last of autumn crumple away toward winter. Cold nights were when Trista felt most like herself.

After a moment, she fished out her earbuds, put on Bauhaus, and set off walking, turning her face up to the darkening sky. She wove her way past students hurrying off from their evening classes, making her way to the northwest edge of campus, where she took a well-rehearsed route through the aging neighborhoods around the university, heading toward Hollow Street.

She wasn’t the only person on the street, of course. A college town on Halloween was a special kind of noisy. Industrial music pulsed from the distant clubs, and the chatter of clustered partygoers in their sexy polyester costumes swelled and faded, mingling with the higher-pitched chatter of late trick-or-treaters. Trista spotted a girl in purple dressed like a bunch of grapes, and recognized her roommate Olivia. She thought of calling out a greeting, but decided against it, hanging back in the shadows as “Dark Entries” buzzed louder in her ears. She was meeting Olivia for breakfast tomorrow, anyway. In the meantime, she had plans.

She let her steps ease into the dark pulse of the music, her chunky black heels clacking time on the street. She wasn’t really dressed practically (her heels and vintage black dress wouldn’t stand up to much punishment), but she felt as if she were dressed right for the occasion. After all, she was visiting a house that wasn’t hers. The least she could do was dress respectfully.

Trista loved abandoned houses. In high school she had often slipped off to poke around the old rotting farmhouse across the fields behind her school. It had been one of those places where someone had just up and left: breakfast dishes still on the table, a rack of dead houseplants by a window. Trista had always looked at the psychedelic paintings on the wall and wondered if the person who’d put them there was still alive, what had led them to leave a place they’d clearly been so fond of.

There had been other houses, too. Some had been empty, full of nothing but rubble and other people’s memories. Others had been time capsules, untouched by anything but decay. One in particular had stuck with her: a one-room cabin in the woods behind the neighborhood where her family lived.

She and her sister Tanya had found it one day while exploring out of bounds. Though Tanya had had the sense to stay outside, Trista had found an open window and wriggled in, startling a clutter of swift-moving centipedes and a handful of mice. She’d meant to have a good look around, but the aura of that house had been so sinister that she’d given up and left after only a minute. As she’d started back toward the window, she’d heard a thump somewhere in the house, and scurried over the windowsill so fast she’d caught a nail and ripped her jeans open.

Intellectually, Trista knew it had probably been a raccoon or something, but intellectual understanding didn’t mean much when it came to haunted houses. She’d always regretted not getting a better look around that place. She’d gone back to look for it later, armed with a flashlight and a first-aid kit, but had never been able to find it again.

Tonight, she had another chance to look the spirit world in the face, and this time she was going to do better.

Trista had heard about the Hollow Street house as a teenager, at friends’ houses in between games of ‘Bloody Mary’ and stories of what someone’s classmate’s cousin had once seen in the corner of the school basement. It was an abandoned property in the middle of Haggerton, Pennsylvania, where a girl had been found dead in the 1950s, without a mark on her. No one knew this girl’s name, or could produce a news clipping or death record to corroborate the story. But she was said to appear there, sometimes, to those who were brave enough to spend the whole night in the house.

The ghost was described as a dark-haired young woman in an old-fashioned dress, and was usually seen in the living room. Sometimes she’d even talk to people, if they didn’t scare her away. There was also something upstairs that no one had seen. Of the few people who’d ventured up the rotten steps to look around, several had reported a terrible sense of menace, the distant sound of footsteps, and occasionally the feeling of hot breath on the backs of their necks. Both had been reported by multiple ghost hunters over the years, though Trista hadn’t been able to find any videos.