Jess Mowry

Anthologies of classic ghost stories - especially such spine-tingling tales as The Mezzotint by M.R. James, The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford, and The Dead Valley by Ralph Adams Cram - have abounded since the late 19th century, proliferating as the 20th advanced and copyrights expired, and multiplying a thousand-fold with the advent of the Internet, when first anyone with a scanner could resurrect them out of a book and post them on a web site; then still ever-increasing as people copied the text from their screens and re-posted it on other sites. So common has this become, that today anyone with Web access can read these stories free. So. why should anyone want to pay for this anthology? Aside from stubbornly clinging (despite all apparent contrary evidence) to the belief that a few decent people still think a living author deserves to be paid for their work - even if, in this case, that work is merely compiling, copy-editing and formatting the work of authors long dead - one reason, I hope, is that my readers might be interested in what I read as a youth and what I think makes a great and scary ghost tale. Regarding Internet incarnations of these stories, the quality, format, and integrity vary. Scanning machines make mistakes; and many people who've scanned and republished these stories online seem to have picked whatever book, magazine or anthology was convenient for the purpose, and in many cases have only published much later reprints with text omissions, abridgments and typos, while often making more typos. I have tried to present the stories here as closely as I could to their original, first-published incarnations -- as I as a kid read most of them -- rather than simply copy them from later reprints, recent anthologies, or Internet sites. While I can't resurrect the atmosphere in which I first read these stories, either while perusing them in the dank and dark of that creepy old shop, or alone in my room in the dead of night in a spooky old Victorian house, nor conjure up the graveyard smell of dusty, decomposing books, still I hope you'll discover the shivers and frights of these thirteen classic ghost stories. Jess Mowry - 2017

Kids run away for many reasons; abusive parents, a bad environment, poverty, lack of love or respect at home. A few run away for adventure. Others hope to find a better life, but most discover that life on the street is cold, hungry and lonely. It's also a jungle of predators. The smarter - or luckier - kids usually find that no matter how bad things were at home, at least they had a bed to sleep in and a chance to really escape by going to school and preparing themselves to win life's battles. Most runaways are heard from again, days, weeks, even months later. But a few kids just disappear, and only their faces on milk cartons, or images on "missing" websites prove they once existed. Collin Thatcher, thirteen-years-old in Oakland, California, has a reason for running away: his self-righteous Aunt Bulah, a part-time social worker and full-time fool, wants to put him in a boot camp for being "lazy and obese," take him away from his "dreamer" father, who was wounded in the Army, given a wheelchair along with a medal, and survives by writing books for kids. With the help of his best friend Ralpa, whose family fled political oppression in Tibet, Collin hopes to defeat his aunt's schemes. He and Ralpa are unexpectedly aided by a homeless boy named Tyger who survives by fishing in a battered old boat. Tyger introduces Collin to the Asian inner-city, a vastly different 'hood from Collin's, yet also plagued by gangs and violence. Collin's plan seems to be working. But then, he and his friends are captured by men who use kids for actors in "films about kids, but not for kids." The boys are also forced to model for comic book covers and VR games. Physically helpless against the men, Collin, Ralpa and Tyger must use their minds and computer skills to escape this dirty cartoon prison and also free the other kids.

Alaska, one of the earth's final frontiers, still mostly unspoiled by human beings who've ravaged much of the rest of the planet. This is the voyage of Arctic Avenger - formerly the steam tug, Rhinoceros - and her rag-tag crew of "seal-savers," an unlikely mix of black, white, and Native-Americans, some dedicated to saving the planet at any cost to themselves, others at first reluctant until realizing that it's not a few bad people doing bad things who threaten the world but a lot of good people doing nothing to stop them. Rowley, black, from Oakland, California, has forged a new life in Alaska as an engineer on a corporate tugboat based in Prince William Sound and saved Russel, his 14-year-old son, who does a man's work as a deckhand, from the gangs, guns, drugs and violence polluting the lower-forty-eight. For a peaceful two years he's been living with Jana, an Aleut woman, in the mountains south of Anchorage. Jana, strong and educated, and an accomplished painter, is nevertheless haunted by ancient ancestral memories and spirits from her childhood. But, Jana's spiritualism and ever-increasing resolve to protect her land conflicts with Rowley's realism, which, though not wholly materialistic, seems a lot more earthly. And there is Russel's apparent mistrust of Jana as a mother-figure. Rowley often tries to tell Jana that children are also an endangered species, and until all human beings have safe, stable, and sustainable environments, there is little hope of saving the animals. Still, he and Jana love each other, and Russel seems to accept their relationship - though perhaps warily - and so far they have usually agreed to disagree on environmental issues. To Rowley, Jana's environmentalism seems more like a therapeutic hobby, though she has invested a lot of her money into a dubious research vessel owned by a young white scientist who, disillusioned by corporate junk-science funded only for profit, has run away to Alaska in hope doing something that matters. But all are brought together, along with two Aleut boys and a white teen refugee from "Outside," to stop a toxic waste dumping plot.

Tumbleweed Terrace Desert View Homes, somewhere south of Tucson, Arizona - "A nice place to raise your kids," as promised by a faded billboard usually used as a vulture perch - is broiling under a blazing brass sun. The land all around is empty except for cactus and sagebrush, mostly shades of rust and gray, and the only green for many miles are the squares of lawns in Tumbleweed Terrace, which, from a vulture's point of view, probably looks as alien as a place to raise your kids on Mars. Tumbleweed Terrace had burst upon the defenseless desert with snarling trucks and roaring bulldozers, screaming saws and thudding air hammers, during America's last housing boom, but then a bust had broken its back like a train running over a rattlesnake and the project has languished for over a decade with most of its houses unoccupied - those that have actually been built - while others are still only skeletons of slowly shriveling two-by-four bones. Dustin Rhodes and his mom and dad are not only one of the very few families who live in this nice suburban ghost town, but also the only black people. Dustin home-schools online, while his father, a Fed-Ex pilot, and his mother, a train dispatcher, are usually away; and Dustin has known mostly solitude for all his thirteen years, though he has, a computer, a love for reading, and a "not-dog" named Spot. Perhaps he thinks he's not really lonely, but after he shows kindness to an elderly Apache shaman, someone moves into the house next door. At first they appear to be only a middle-aged man-and-wife, friendly and seemingly nice, but Dustin soon discovers they seem to be hiding someone in their house. Dustin begins to investigate and comes to the conclusion that it must be a boy of around his own age... but why is he being hidden?

Some might say 14-year-old Brandon Williams is an over-privileged snowflake. He lives in a million-dollar house overlooking the ocean in Santa Cruz, California, gets a weekly allowance equal to the take-home pay of many service industry workers, and has gone to a private, all-white school from Kindergarten through eighth grade. Health-nazis call him "obese," but to most normal people he's simply chubby, and handsome by Caucasian standards. Brandon should be happy - or at least think he is - but he's not. Like many young teens he's sure there must be a "there" somewhere that's better than the present "here," and he's tried to find it in fantasy games. He's also tried to dull his angst in various chemical ways, and wasted a year of his youth staying high. Brandon hopes to be a writer and use words as weapons to fight world's wrongs. Being who he is and living where he does, he's never experienced discrimination or hate based on appearance or race. Despite the protests of his liberal-minded and loving, but career-oriented and somewhat distant parents, Brandon decides to attend public high school. But his first day is a reality shock as he discovers what public education in the U.S. is all about... pounding just enough knowledge and mainstream values into kids' empty skulls so they can become productive Proles. Since no one knows him, he naturally falls in with the outcasts, which include Travis White, one of the school's few black students and the fattest at five-hundred pounds. There is also Bosco Donatello, a chubby world-class surfer dude, though indifferent to his fame and seemingly oblivious to the present as if he's been transported through time from 1963. As the story progresses, Brandon struggles with the question of whether a person can empathize with the suffering of others unless he or she has suffered. Along these lines he discovers that most of what he "knows" about black people - and fat people - is only what he's been taught. Phat Acceptance is a mix of issues, including consumerism, advertising, propaganda, xenophobia, and how kids are brainwashed from the time they first turn on a TV into buying what they're told to buy, wearing what they're told to wear, eating what they're told to eat, looking how they're told to look - which now includes weighing what they're told to weigh - and hating who they're told to hate. It also illustrates how the "war on childhood obesity" gives haters a group of people whom it's socially acceptable to hate, as well as how sheep-like most people are in accepting how "unhealthy" they are because they're being told they are by a health and fitness industry with multi-billion dollar profits. The result is a new religion of "health" and a holy war against those who won't worship.

The year is 1860 in the United States of America. The industrial revolution has brought railroads for fast transportation. Steamships cross the seas, and riverboats ply the waterways. Telegraph provides instant communication; and machines are beginning to replace much dreary human labor. But, thirteen-year-old Skyler Knight returns from a year of schooling in New Orleans to the tiny Louisiana bayou town of Knight's Crossing - named after his family - to find that nothing seems to have changed. This is mostly a relief: there were too many new ideas in New Orleans; too much change happening too fast for his liking. Skyler, raised on his family's huge plantation, was brought up to believe that black people were animals. Intelligent animals, yes, but certainly not human beings. Yet, Skyler is beginning to wonder about that, to at least subconsciously question the morality of slavery. These are dangerous notions for a boy who will inherit a hundred slaves. But, something new HAS come to Knight's Crossing. After getting off the train, Skyler encounters two black boys of around his age. One is Cartwright, a handsome, muscular boy who was purchased to be a companion for a wealthy plantation-owner's son. The other is an enormously fat boy named Loki - called Lucky - who belongs to Seth Franklin, a little-known and reclusive man who owns a small plantation deep in the bayou. There are rumors that Franklin is too kind to his slaves; that he's allowed them to get fat and lazy. ...And worse, "uppity," and Lucky seems to confirm all these rumors. Although at thirteen Skyler has supposedly learned all he is expected to know about life, it's during the next year that his real education begins.

Reaps is a collection of ghost and supernatural tales... though several don't need ghosts to be scary. Most feature a rarity in the genre of young-adult books... young black male protagonists resourceful, brave and intelligent, and many in settings other than the inner-city.Examples of other settings where young black males encounter ghosts, deal with hauntings - benign or malignant - vanquish demons, and Satan Himself, are "Goat Boy" somewhere in America's heartland, "Children Of Death," which takes place in Haiti, "The Train To Lost Lake," in a forest in Maine, and "The Picture" set in a "nice little town."Stories which may or may not feature ghosts but are haunting nevertheless, include "Spontaneous Combustion," a gothic-themed reminder that hate still haunts this world, as well as the "The Execution" which is hauntingly surreal. Homelessness can also be scary, especially to an 8-year-old-boy who may be dying of pneumonia in an abandoned funeral parlor.Jess Mowry does not take the safe route, whether walking through a graveyard at night or an inner-city alley; and neither are his characters the safe and stereotypical heroes who look the parts and play the roles allowed by the mainstream guardians of what young people "should" read. Most are on the verge of manhood and without guides, either spiritual or real, who find they must become their own heroes, and seek their own light in a dark scary world.

13-year-old Remy DuMont, newly arrived from Haiti, where his family lived in poverty, hopes that life will be different in West Oakland, California, where refrigerators, hot running water and television are but three new wonders. But when he and his parents move into the second-floor apartment of a spooky old Victorian house in a neighborhood haunted by real-life terrors of gangs, drugs and violence, the last thing Remy expects are ghosts Every night at 3:13 while his mother and father sleep, Remy hears a train approaching, seemingly headed straight for the house. From his window he sees a murder committed aboard the train as it rumbles past below. Remy soon realizes that the murderer, the victim, and the train are ghosts; and the murder he sees reenacted each night happened in 1943 when Liberty ships were built in Oakland to help win World War II. Together with his downstairs neighbor, chubby, streetwise, Niya Bedford, also 13, they put together the pieces of this undiscovered crime, which includes the unexplained disappearance of another 13-year-old boy, the son of the elderly and reclusive landlady who lives on the house's dark third floor. In their attempt to solve the mystery by searching for a body they believe to have been buried in the house's basement, Remy and Niya find themselves pulled into the ghostly manifestation where the laws of the living don't apply, becoming ghosts from the future seemingly haunting the past and locked in a life-and-death struggle with a dead murderer and time itself.

13-year-old Jarrett Ross has been no more than a ghost for months, a lonely ghost crying in the darkness where no one can see or hear him. A drug dealer put moves on his mom, got her addicted, and now rules their tiny apartment in a ancient West Oakland Victorian house. Jarrett's only refuge has been his room, its door locked with a skeleton key. But one rainy night even that protection fails him when the man breaks open the door. In a fight for Jarrett's life the man falls down a stairwell. Jarrett, battered and bleeding, knows the cops will never believe the man's death was accidental and Jarrett was acting in self-defense. He has to run away Weak from loss of blood, Jarrett stumbles through dark streets and alleys with no destination except getting away. Finally, he finds himself at the rusty iron gates of small and forgotten graveyard and collapses to wait for death. But instead of the Dark Angel, a chubby homeless boy appears... a boy who also had to run from sins the world made him commit and now dwells alone in this place of the dead. Together, they fight to restore Jarrett's life.

For thirteen-year-old Dante and his friends, life in Babylon isn't about having choices but only trying to stay alive. Dante, born to a crack-addicted mother, needs a heart operation if he hopes to live to reach thirty; Pook seemingly has no hope of going to medical school and becoming a doctor; Wyatt's biggest handicap is being smart in a mostly stupid place - a disadvantage shared by his little brother, Cheo - Jinx is trying to get off crack; and Radgi is homeless out on the streets. But when the boys find a package of pure coke dumped by a drug-dealer running from cops, it suddenly seems that they do have choices... if they can somehow sell it. But that's a very dangerous choice... and will it be the right one?

13-year-old Mike Saunders, African-American, and raised by his novel-writing dad in the nice suburban environment of Thousand Oaks, California, is dismayed when his father's uncertain income forces a move to a tumbledown shack in the desolate sweltering desert of Coyote Valley, Arizona. The property, such as it is -- electricity unreliable, and only a windmill for water -- was left to Mike's dad by Mike's great-uncle, who died at the age of 107 after spending most of his life searching for a ton of gold bars stolen in a train robbery in 1897 and reputedly still buried somewhere near the robbery site. Except for its rusty narrow-gauge track, the Coyote Valley And Codyville railroad, abandoned in 1917, has almost been forgotten, along with the ghost town of Codyville somewhere up in the mountains. But Mike, though a model-railroader having an interest in real steam trains, is more concerned upon his arrival to find that the only potential friends within twenty miles are Carson, 12, a smart-ass "gamer" and Little Coyote, 13, an enormously fat Apache boy who lives in a shack no better than Mike's at what had once been a water stop on the abandoned railroad. Mike isn't sure he wants to befriend either one. But, as the story unfolds, revealing desert legend and lore, crusty old wild west characters, an adventure in an abandoned mine, a steam locomotive resurrected, and an encounter with gun-toting ghosts, Mike learns that true friends come in all colors and sizes, and souls aren't judged by BMI, or how much wealth one accumulates while breathing the air of this earth.

Meet Jerry Mathers, who, though resembling the middle-aged "Beaver," bears no other relation, having been born in the 1970s when that illusion of American life was almost a decade dead. His mother, widowed by the Vietnam War, endured many years as a Woolworth's clerk to bring Jerry up in a "nice neighborhood," enabling him to go to college and fulfill his dreams of being an artist... at least thus far sufficient enough to still believe in them.However, the present is 2013, and Jerry finds himself 39, still only an underpaid teacher of Art at a private school in Oakland, California, his dreams apparently slipping away... as his mother is also slipping away in a nursing home he can't afford. And, resolving years before that the road to romance was closed to him -- perhaps by a long-fallen bridge -- he faces a dark and lonely future.His fifteenth year of teaching begins, as have all his others, in a gloomy Victorian mansion bequeathed for the education of youth by Miss Minerva Morrison, who passed away in 1901 at the age of 97, and whose portrait hangs in the shadowy foyer. By film and ghost story stereotypes the huge house looks like it should be haunted, but though there have been "sightings" -- presumably of Miss Morrison's ghost -- Jerry has never been haunted... at least until this year.But why? Could it be that one of his new students, a remarkable boy named Gabriel Graves, divinely gifted in drawing from life and able to see the souls of his subjects -- but also the first black youth to ever enroll in the school -- has awakened a sleeping racial hatred from over a hundred years in the past? A hatred that may be deadly to both teacher and student.

Not quite in the center of Africa lies a tiny land called Kiwanja whose people have lived in undisturbed peace for many thousands of years. But, times have changed in the outside world: satellites spy on everyone because anything that isn't possessed is a threat to those who don't posses it. But one thing that hasn't changed is war.Thirteen-year-old Dakota is the son of Nathi, a Kiwanjian bush pilot who flies an ancient C-47. Dakota is skilled in take-offs and landings from dirt airstrips in the dead of night, skimming hilltops to avoid radar, and dodging enemy aircraft. Dakota has only known war in his life, war in which children kill other children commanded by adult "generals." One side wants to rule the land to "bring it into the future," the other claims to be fighting for freedom and ancient traditional ways of life, but both bring only terror and death to the innocent people caught in the middle. Meanwhile, in the United States, Nicole Neale, a divorced single-parent with an almost-thirteen-year-old son named Zack, fights a more civilized war to keep her job with a small corporation that manufactures many things from boys' action-figures to military uniforms... though much of the work is done by children in dirty, third-world sweatshops. Will winning her war in boardrooms save her son from what seems like enslavement to video games, material values, the lure of money, and possibly drugs? And, why should her company, subsidized by the U.S. Government, have any interest in a tiny African country? The only thing Nicole knows about Kiwanja is that its people make beautiful boots.

Evil always lingers in a land where men have enslaved other men. Such evil is discovered by Kody Carver, a 13-year-old African-American boy who spends his summers in the Old French Quarter of New Orleans. There with Raney Tanner, his alligator-wrestling bayou cousin, he helps his magical Aunt Simone with Voodoo ceremonies for tourists in his aunt's haunted house. By day, Kody and Raney cruise the steamy streets of the Old French Quarter, where other kids sell Voodoo charms and vampire teeth, or dance for money. By night, Kody and Raney become Voodoo boys in loincloths and bones. The audience thinks it's all showtime, but a lot of the magic is real. But, when Kody is almost gunned-down by an eight-year-old named Newton, who was sent out to kill to prove himself worthy of membership in a kid-gang called The Skeleton Crew, Kody discovers the real gang leader has been dead for almost two-hundred years. Kody and Raney set out to save the young gang members from death - or worse - with help from an undead boy.

Petite Orphelin Isle, a tiny Caribbean island near Haiti, where the descendants of African slaves, survivors of an ancient shipwreck, have lived not only in harmony, but also in prosperity for over three-hundred years. Although they might not seem prosperous to the "civilized" world, having no electricity, television or computers, and the only vehicle on the island is a 1904 steam tractor, to Donte Manuxet, age thirteen, proficient in mechanical skills as well as seafaring knowledge, there is no place on earth he would rather live; a sentiment shared by his closest friends, Timothy and Thomas Durant, ages thirteen and eight, sons of the island's chief, and Tiya Millay, age thirteen, daughter of the Mambo and experienced in Voodoo as well as ghostly matters. But when a luxurious yacht limps to their island with engine trouble and Donte and his friends meet Randy Lancaster, also thirteen and heir to his deceased father's fortune, events begin to transpire that result in them all being lost at sea and finding a rusty old cargo steamer apparently abandoned... at least by anyone alive.