Can I Tell You a Ghost Story?

Welcome back to Scare Me! a weekly horror newsletter. Today, I’m still recovering from last week’s work trip to Utah—so I’m going to tell you a story about something very strange indeed.

I’ve been writing this newsletter for nearly five months, but there’s one type of story that I haven’t told until now: a real, honest-to-god ghost story. One that happened to me!

I’ve only had three experiences I can’t quite explain—and to be honest, I’m still not sure I’d say I completely believe in ghosts. I’m generally skeptical; my brain has never easily tuned into the mystical or religious realms, no matter how much I’ve wanted to or tried.

But I trust my senses—and I’ve touched, smelled, and heard odd things. Three specific things I can’t see, but also can’t explain away.

I’m sure I’ll tell you all of my maybe-ghost stories eventually. But for now: Let’s start with the story about sound, and a specific spirit whose life blazed a vivid legacy in the American southwest.

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I was standing in the living room when it happened. iPhone in hand, voice recorder switched on, I was deep in conversation with Marc Tickle, a kaleidoscope artist who’d traveled all the way from England to attend a weeklong celebration of the kaleidoscopic arts in Jerome, Arizona. Jerome had very nearly become a ghost town after its mine closed down, but hippies bought its buildings for as little as a dollar apiece, and soon it attracted a healthy little artist community. Today, the frontman of Tool owns a winery there.

To the untrained eye, we were at a very normal (if slightly eccentric) party. A dozen antique sewing machines lined the walls, serving as makeshift tables for a variety of chips, vegetables, squares of cornbread, and abandoned bowls of chili. Around us, silver-haired guests mingled and chatted, the buzz of tipsy conversation mellow as the cool night air drifted in through the open front door.

To me, half a year deep in a major reporting project, it was a surreal moment. I’d spent months tracing the history of American kaleidoscope artists, from a Renaissance Fair-fueled boom in the 1980s through the present day. My reporting had taken me from my home in the DC metro area to Charles Karadimos’ home museum in Maryland. I’d spent hours on the phone, hours hunting down outdated websites, hours traveling to Arizona for this event. Everything had been leading to this moment, when the subjects of my fascination wandered around me freely.

Some of the most influential kaleidoscope artists alive were at the gathering, paired off in friendly conversations. There was Mary Wills, the gruff but generous owner of Nellie Bly, a shop that hosts the largest collection of kaleidoscopes in the US. Throughout the week, I met Maine-based artist Sue Rioux; glassworker JeriLyn Alderman; friendly, laid-back Scott Cole, who once made kaleidoscopes out of plastic vegetables and taught me how to make my own kaleidoscope during a full-day workshop.

The artists had gathered for an annual event that was part philanthropy, part deal-making. The Kaleidoscope Weekend was equally teaching kaleidoscope hobbyists in workshops and allowing these longtime friends to catch up and spend time together. Some had been brought together by kaleidoscope patron Cozy Baker, who founded the Brewster Society. The artists had traveled to Japan together, where a museum in Kyoto acquired their work for a museum exhibit, and they Airdropped me fifty pictures from the trip.

They were aging, retiring, but still making art. And they were ready to reflect on what it all meant, and I was happy to listen.

There I was, mid-conversation, when all of a sudden: CRASH.

Just one loud sound: CRASH.

It was the sound of furniture falling two stories and smashing on the ground. In my mind’s eye, I saw a wooden chair or an end table; something heavy, sturdy, solid. It was loud, jarring, and physical. It displaced air and reverberated through the open front door, cutting through the buzz of conversation like a club smacking the ground.

The noise interrupted my conversation with Marc and made us whip our heads toward the open front door. Around us, everyone else carried on their conversations, unaffected. We tried to do the same for a moment, before Marc said, Sorry, I want to check what that was. I trailed after him toward the strip of gravelly dirt that served as a front porch.

Outside, more people were chatting, cigarette cherries glowing in the dark desert night. A few craned their necks toward the roof of the single-story house. What was that crash? Marc asked. Is everyone okay? We heard it, too, they told us, but there was nothing there.

A little later, in the kitchen, Mary Wills said matter-of-factly, It was Katie.

Mary knew everything, and I believe she was right.

Katie Lee wore a stack of hats so tall they could blot out the sun. She’s known as a cowboy singer, a folk historian, a photographer, a filmmaker, an environmental activist, and the self-proclaimed Grand Dame of Dam Busting. From her birth in 1919 to her death nearly a century later, she earned a reputation as a foul-mouthed firecracker. She raged against the dams that artificially altered the Arizona landscape, drying up the canyons and breaking her heart.

On Katie’s 90th birthday, her friends in Jerome lined the streets to greet her—topless or nude, a proud parade that made Katie laugh her heart out.

By the time I visited Jerome, Katie was gone. The newspapers say that she died in her sleep, but her friends seemed to believe there was more complexity to it than that. There’s really no way to know if Katie and her life partner mutually agreed to depart this world, whether doing so granted them a final and lasting dignity or whether I misunderstood the intimations I thought I sensed. But the way her friends talked, it seemed like that was Katie: fearless, romantic, liberated, and private when she wanted to be.

And now we were in her house—some of us her lifelong friends, others strange interlopers like me who barely had any business being there. Throwing a chili-and-cornbread party. Absent-mindedly scattering crumbs on every surface. Leaving rings on the wood where we forgot to use a cocktail napkin or a coaster.

I’ll never forget that crash: how loud it was, how sudden, how physical and close and convincingly present. How it erupted from an invisible source, in the midst of a group of reasonably alert people. How it sprang suddenly and impossibly from the empty night air. My tape recorder was running, but in all these years, I’ve never played the recording back. I want to believe this really happened, and not that it was a bizarre hallucination Marc and I shared.

Was it Katie, making her discontent known? Katie, expressing her irritation that we could all carry on holding sweating beer bottles and dipping chips in room temperature guacamole even though she was gone?

Can a woman who loved her home and its wild landscape so fiercely ever truly leave it? Would she want to stay?

I eventually did place a story about the kaleidoscope weekend, in the fourteenth issue of Broccoli magazine. I wrote about filling my own handmade kaleidoscope’s object cell with bits of seashell and twirls of pink paperclips, dichroic glass in a variety of colors.

But I kept the ghost story to myself. Broccoli had fact checkers, and I couldn’t possibly prove it was true.

Next Up: A Conversation With Author and Podcaster Neil McRobert

A little over a week ago, I got up early and hopped on a pre-workday video call with Neil McRobert! Neil hosts a weekly podcast called Talking Scared, where he interviews the biggest names in horror literature, including Paul Tremblay, Rachel Harrison, Josh Malerman, Nat Cassidy, Kirsty Logan, and so many more.

This October, Neil’s debut novella will be released by Wild Hunt Books as part of their Northern Weird series. Good Boy is a vivid folk horror that’s far more epic than its slim 120 pages should reasonably allow. In a small village in northern England, an ancient evil stalks children, satiating its hunger with devastating consequences. That is, until an extraordinary dog arrives in town and chooses one man as his lifelong companion. THE Stephen King says, “An excellent story – reminded me of classic English stories of the supernatural. People like M.R. James and Arthur Machen. Heady company to be in!”

I loved this book and Neil graciously let me pepper him with questions about it for an hour! I’m looking forward to sharing the conversation next week.

Scare Me! is a free weekly horror newsletter published every Thursday morning. It’s written by Michelle Delgado, featuring original illustrations by Sam Pugh. You can find the archive of past issues here. If you were sent this by a friend, subscribe to receive more spooky interviews, essays—and maybe even a ghost story or two.