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By Alan Heathcock
Smoke from the campfire swirls up into the darkness. I peer up through the woods, the black branches against the gray night, and wonder if I'm alone.
My imagination was forged by storytellers, my father spinning tales of decapitated coal miners running through fields of corn; my mother telling me, like a secret, about waking in her childhood home to see an Indian in the moonlight, watching her through her bedroom window.
Nothing makes the world more alive to me than a ghost story. And when I need my fix of spectral wonder, I turn to the Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood, authored by an Englishman whose name is not known as much as his influence is seen in the work of everyone from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King.
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