Literary Nonfiction

Three months before my husband and I married, we moved to a house on the route of a ghost tour. It didn’t stop outside our door, but one block away was a haunted graveyard and a house that when photographed had white orbs hovering outside its upper windows. The tour guides wore long black coats …

In the Silk City, seventeen-year-old Jennie Bosschieter makes ribbons inside a factory. Men work the vats of the neighboring dye houses, coloring so many miles of silk thread that they could connect Paterson, New Jersey, to the Netherlands, the country where Jennie was born, thousands of times and still leave enough to spare for the …

In 1985 statues across Ireland began to move. On Valentine’s Day, in the village of Asdee, seven-year-old Elizabeth Flynn was saying Hail Marys when a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus beckoned her with a curled finger. The Blessed Mother followed suit. When Elizabeth called to her sisters to tell them what she’d seen, …

Sundays when I was a small boy, my paternal grandmother watched the faith healer Oral Roberts on our Philco television. She was almost eighty years old at the time and nearly blind with cataracts. I watched with her because I was fascinated with television. An only child, I learned to entertain myself. I loved the …