In a part of New Jersey where snakes slither slowly across a road, still coiled and yet somehow still moving; in a part of New Jersey where an insect that looks like a miniaturized bat sits on your windshield, menacing you while you make a sound that doesn’t sound quite like you from inside your car; in a part of New Jersey with a disproportionate amount of road kill in an already highly populated-by-road kill state; in a part of New Jersey where your phone cannot, will not pick up any kind of signal; here, in West Milford, in the county of Passaic, lies Clinton Road, a 10-mile stretch of haunted highway.

From what I can understand from my many-miles-away vantage point, New Jersey is an absolute nexus of weird shit, and this piece about the strange shenanigans on Clinton Road is a brilliant read.

Is there any way to write about death that is not as a single tragedy or as a mass clean-up operation? I care about ghost stories because I believe in them another possibility for storytelling, for understanding the past, and for processing grief. The ghost, perhaps, need not be exterminated or expiated. The ghost may not be a problem to solve. The ghost might be merely a gift.

At their core, ghost stories are almost always grief stories. This beautiful, poignant piece from Ghostland author Colin Dickey takes on Ghost, Ghostbusters and pandemic grieving in New York.

Like people in any rural place, Eastern Kentuckians have their fair share of hatchets yet to be buried. Many of us have long histories with one another, and there are people who won’t even make eye contact while sitting in the same room. Long-held personal and political divides linger. But during those flood days, all grudges and feuds seemed to be put on hold to serve a higher purpose. And then the goblins came.

In the aftermath of disastrous floods, Eastern Kentucky saw a wave of sightings of strange goblin-like creatures. Did the floods displace them too? Do they come closer at times of crisis? A story of surreal moments during a community’s most turbulent days.