31/10/2024
Most kids would be terrified of growing up in a haunted Victorian Mansion down the road from a graveyard, but not Helen. She didn’t mind the ghosts she encountered daily—the quiet little boy who lived in her basement, the tattered Civil War soldiers who stood outside her front door, the spectral infants who drifted from their unmarked graves to her room to say hello. In fact, she loved them. They were her friends. More importantly, they were her partners in a pact: she would look after their home, and in return, the dead promised to protect her from a living danger, a figure who had been tracking Helen and her brother, Simon, since they were toddlers. Their mother called him the Bogeyman.
The Bogeyman had found Helen and Simon before and he had taken them thousands of miles away. It was months until they were rescued. Safely back in their mother’s care, they lived like prey behind locked doors, ever vigilant, always ready to move. The Bogeyman was still out there. And, to Helen, it seemed like no earthly force could stop him from returning. Co-published with Literary Hub, co-edited by Joshuah Bearman and Gina Mei and featuring art by Ruben Hiraga, Helen Vogelsong-Donahue’s heartbreaking, bone-chilling tale unveils the horrors of being hunted as well as the unexpected pleasures of being haunted.
https://lithub.com/good-ghosts-and-bad-fathers-the-story-of-a-haunting-a-kidnapping-and-an-international-incident/
