Ghost stories from Mexico

The Morning Caller

I work for a small mental health clinic in the outskirts of Mérida, where we provide therapy for children with autism. The building we occupy is an old, converted house,...

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The Beckoning Palm

It started seven years ago, not with a bang, but with a gesture. I remember stepping out of the guest bathroom in my aunt’s old farmhouse, the one with the...

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The Night the Crickets Stopped

It was a hot August evening, and my wife, Lena, and I had driven out to my cousin Harold’s farmhouse for a family reunion. The place was old, with creaking...

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The Weeping Woman of Calle del Silencio

The house on Calle del Silencio was a relic of a bygone era, its crumbling adobe walls and rusted iron gates whispering secrets of the past. I had moved there...

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The Presence in the Old House

In my youth, we lived in a home that was never quiet. Strange sounds and fleeting shadows were a normal part of life. I was not frightened then, but I...

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The Bone Child of La Hacienda

I was eleven when my parents sent me to live with my grandmother in La Hacienda de los Cedros, a fading coffee plantation tucked in the misty highlands of Veracruz....

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The Salt Wind’s Debt

The motel was called ‘Casa del Desierto,’ which was a generous name for a crumbling two-story adobe building on the edge of a fishing village south of San Felipe. We’d...

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The Keeper of the Pines

My family has always been tight-lipped about the old farmhouse, the one that sat at the edge of the county, surrounded by pines that whispered secrets to the wind. My...

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The Blue Chair

My earliest memory is of the blue chair. Not the one in the living room—that was beige, scratchy, and perpetually dusty. No, the blue chair was in my grandfather’s study,...

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The Bone-Dry Hours

Three hours from the coastal city of Veracruz, the village of San Idelfonso baked under a sun that seemed permanently stalled at noon. I was there with three fellow medical...

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The Static in the Walls

I was nine when we moved to the old farmhouse on Cedar Lane, a place my father had inherited from a distant uncle we never spoke of. The house had...

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The Blue Door Sentinel

The village of San Miguel de los Altos clings to the side of a mountain like a stubborn moss. It’s not the kind of place you find on a map,...

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I Saw my Grandmother’s Shadow

When I was a little girl, me and my family would always travel to Mexico for Christmas and New Years. It would be me, my mom, my sister, my aunts...

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The Silent Procession of San Mateo

Three years ago, I went to visit my grandparents in the dusty hills of Jalisco. My cousins and I spent the evenings in the plaza, throwing firecrackers at the stray...

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The Custodian’s Last Round

When my uncle Marco was a young man, he took a night janitorial job at a remote research station perched on the edge of the Alaskan tundra. The facility was...

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The Third Bell

The summer I turned fourteen, my father, my sister Elena, and I drove from our cramped apartment in Pico Rivera to my grandmother’s village in the highlands of Oaxaca. It...

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The Kitchen Door

Three nights after my grandmother’s funeral, I lay in my cousin’s narrow bed in her attic bedroom, the glow of the television painting strange shapes on the sloped ceiling. The...

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The Seventh Chair

I hadn’t seen the old farmhouse in over a decade, not since I was a kid and my grandmother would let me chase fireflies in the tall grass behind the...

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The Marigold Visitor

The town of Ashford lay nestled in a valley where the fog crept in like a thief every evening, stealing the colors from the world until only gray remained. My...

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The Ironwood Ledger

I was fourteen when Owen married my second cousin, Mara. He was tall, with the kind of polished reserve that made my aunts whisper ‘snobbish’ and my uncles roll their...

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The Marble Pact

The summer I turned nine, my mother sent me to my grandfather’s house in the dusty outskirts of Oaxaca. It was a fortress of a home, cinderblock and rebar, with...

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The Alabaster Door

The year I turned eight, my parents sent me to stay with my grandfather in the dusty town of San Isidro. His house was a squat fortress of faded adobe,...

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The Hollow of the Stair

My cousin Elena and I had always shared a peculiar bond, growing up in the damp, creaking farmhouse that had been in our family for generations. She and her brother,...

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The Salt Gift

In the autumn of 1994, I met Tomas during the annual symposium of the marine research institute where we both worked. Tomas ran a remote field station on the Baja...

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