Ghosts of Bergen County by Dana Cann

black—wedged between two bricks that served as bookends. Each spine bore the name YODER and some variation of the same title.
    â€œThe Ghosts of books,” Dr. Yoder said. “Is that what you’ve found up there, Ferko? First editions, all of them, though not worth the paper they’re printed on. Still, I’m proud of them.”
    â€œYou wrote them?” Ferko pulled one down. Ghosts of Brooklyn . Inside was a map of Brooklyn with circled numbers. Each of these, he learned upon turning the page to the table of contents, corresponded to a chapter in the book.
    â€œThey occupied me when I was younger. A lot of research and a lot of writing. I love ghost stories.”
    â€œWhere did you grow up?” Ferko asked, his finger marking the first chapter, titled “The Orange Street Ghost.”
    â€œWashington Heights. Is that the volume you have there?”
    â€œ Brooklyn .”
    â€œA contractual obligation. Start with Washington Heights , the top of Manhattan.”
    Ferko replaced Brooklyn on the mantel and chose Ghosts of Washington Heights , the book with the black cover.
    â€œIn the first half of the twentieth century,” Dr. Yoder said, “Washington Heights was remote and insular, the perfect place for ghosts to thrive. I explain it in the introduction to that book, my first one. Ghosts are like animals that live in the forests. Encroachment from new development destroys their habitat. Ghosts of Edgefield or ghosts of Bergen? I imagine there are, but their presence is too diffuse to be felt. There’s too much here that’s new.”
    Ferko had his own apparition, even though his house was only three years old. “You know a lot about ghosts,” he said.
    â€œI’m not a scholar. But I’m not a kook, either. Unfortunately, the latter outnumber the former by a wide margin.”
    â€œHave you ever seen one?”
    â€œSeeing is not the right question. I’m blind now, but long before I became blind I knew what it was like to feel a presence without seeing it.” He stood and turned toward the stairs. “Peruse Washington Heights . The house in the first chapter is on the street where I grew up. It’s a bookstore now. They still sell the book.” He trundled forward. “Let me see what’s become of our Jen. She’s supposed to take me to the pharmacy.” He mounted the stairs.
    Ferko turned to the first chapter—“The Preacher’s House (185th Street).” The narrative described a house built in 1925 by a Methodist preacher, a Reverend Hurlingham. Now the house had a ghost—the spirit of a boy in its basement, a shallow space, five feet deep, once accessible only by a ladder that hung from a trapdoor in a closet. Legend had it that the preacher sent his children to the basement when they were unruly or when he was in a sour mood. The basement had no lights, no windows. You closed the trapdoor leading to the closet, and the basement contained the sort of blackness that had a tangible quality.
    Reverend Hurlingham and his wife, Libby, had eight children—six boys and two girls—before Libby died of an unexplained illness at the age of thirty-seven. A few years later, so the story went, the youngest boy, Sebastian, who was five and particularly prone to fits, bit his father’s arm. It was the sort of infraction that, in many households of the time (and, indeed, in many households today, Dr. Yoder noted), would have resulted in whacks with a stick or a belt or an open hand. But the preacher had a better punishment in the basement of the house on 185th Street.
    It was late, past bedtime, which further fueled the preacher’s impatience and rage, and so he caught Sebastian by the collar and dragged him toward the closet, picked the boy up, and dropped him, crying, down the hole. The preacher shut the hinged hatch, which stifled Sebastian’s screams, and placed a heavy trunk over it, and the