DescriptionThese hundred or so pages are intended as the beginning step to recording part of my life. Roughly covering the years of 1995 to 2010, they chart my parents’ purchase of a farmhouse in the Appalachian Mountains of central Pennsylvania. The house, which had been built in 1846 by a local farmer named James Maginnis Martin, is, my family believes, haunted. The stories contained here detail both some the ghosts that shared our living spaces—as my mother and sister would characterize them, this means flashes of light, mists in the shapes of the dead, the sound of ghostly singing reverberating through the pipes, a baby’s cry rising from the basement—as well as the ghosts we kept close to our hearts: the specters of the lives we hoped to live.