Katherine Traylor

Trista has always loved abandoned houses and the paranormal. Now that she’s at college only fifteen minutes from the notoriously haunted Hollow Street house, she knows exactly where she’s spending Halloween. She packs a bag, puts on her favorite vintage dress, and sets off, hoping to spot the ghost of the young, dark-haired woman who’s said to haunt the house’s living room.<br><br>Fellow student Keira does not like abandoned houses, and she isn’t particularly interested in ghosts. Visiting the Hollow Street house was not how she’d planned to spend Halloween. But her little sister, who loves all things spooky, has begged Keira to check out the haunted house next to her university, and Keira has trouble saying no. She doesn’t expect to see anything supernatural, so it’s quite a shock to find herself face-to-face with a mysterious young woman in old-fashioned clothing who seems to have appeared from nowhere.<br><br>When the two ghost-hunters come face to face, each mistakes the other for the ghost she’s looking for. How tragic, they both think, that such a beautiful person should have died so young. Of course, things aren’t as bleak as they seem, and the two women might find themselves pleasantly surprised ... if they can make it to the morning. Because real entities haunt the Hollow Street house, and they’re anything but friendly.

Spirits in the Dark

Her fear receded as her mind began to engage with this new problem: in a stunningly short time, she had become completely infatuated with a woman who had been dead for seven decades. She couldn’t even ask herself to regret it. She already knew that Keira wasn’t someone you could ever regret.


“Beautiful,” she whispered again, swallowing tears. “Do you have any more?”


Keira hesitated even longer than before. At last, she began to speak again, reciting another poem, and then another, and another. Trista listened, awestruck and heartbroken, and tried not to think about how much this was going to hurt when it ended.


Keira was serenading a ghost. It was possibly the stupidest and most wonderful thing she’d ever done.


Her mouth seemed to be moving without her consent, her heart dealing up poem after poem from a treasury of verse she’d never shown to anyone and never planned to. Did it count as sharing your work, if the only one hearing it had been dead for seventy years?


Chapter 10