I
A spirit was lurking in the stairwell of the historic steps on Savannah’s waterfront.
For months, the steps had been even more treacherous than usual. Not only tourists but folks who had lived in Savannah all their lives had slipped going up or down—skinned knees, scraped hands, laughed nervously and said they must have missed a stair or misjudged the height. A few accused friends of pushing them, but said friends vehemently denied it, accusing the accusers of clumsiness in turn.
At last, a tourist had broken a leg and threatened to sue the city. Never mind the signs at either end, warning users the steps were historical and therefore not up to code. The signs probably would have prevented the success of such a lawsuit, but the city, tired of complaints, hung caution tape across the stairwell, and closure signs for good measure, and turned their attention to other things.
Unbeknownst to them, the unassuming old white man standing before the steps in the wee hours of a mild April morning hoped to solve their problem before the sun rose.
He didn’t look like a ghost-hunter. He was tall and thin, with blue eyes, a hawkish nose, and thin lips that rarely smiled. Just now, a messenger bag was slung over his shoulder. Dressed in flannel, jeans, and work boots, he looked like a farmer—which he wasn’t but had been in his boyhood some two centuries ago.
Now he was a groundskeeper. At Colonial Park Cemetery for the present, but not for much longer if all went well this morning.
He thumbed up the brim of his flat cap, contemplating the stairwell and the spirit therein. No corporeal form, but a haze of color and smell and emotion, a rotted greenish brown that smelled like Georgia’s coastal salt marshes but more. The whole stairwell was mucky with fear. Windows rattled in the buildings on either side.
The groundskeeper glanced down the street, saw no one, lifted the caution tape and stepped under it.
A cloud of fear enveloped him. Rot oozed on his tongue, a phantom feeling of sludge. When he’d been young and freshly cursed, the spirits’ swell of emotion had overwhelmed him. He’d drowned in it, unable to separate the feelings of the dead from his own. They’d scared him, the feelings. The voices, not that they were precisely voices. For decades, he’d avoided them when he could, ignored them when he couldn’t. Even Jack had never known about them.
These days, the dead comforted him: company he didn’t fear losing and never got to know too well. The closest to death he ever came. A reason for him to live, if there were a reason when life had been too long already.
Of course, there was the curse. But the curse wasn’t a reason to live so much as the thing keeping him alive.
The windows rattled harder. The rusting metal handrail in the center of the steps groaned.
The groundskeeper sucked in his cheeks, hoping he at last had good information. He’d spotted the spirit right off, soon as he’d visited the east end of River Street, but he’d had a devilish time finding anything out about it. When his usual hunt through libraries and newspapers failed him, he’d resorted to riding around with the tourists on three of Savannah’s many ghost tours. The last had set him on the right track, after two hours on a cramped trolley beside an Ohio teen who never once let up complaining.
This ghost tour was nothing, the teen had said. He’d spent loads of time in the cemetery back home, and it was way scarier. He’d seen ghosts at home. He’d thought they were going to see one on the tour, too, and didn’t their guide have any better ghost stories?
The groundskeeper, of course, had actually seen several spirits on the tour. But in the absence of anyone under age twelve, he was the only one. As the trolley bumped over the cobbles, tilting alarmingly on the steep ramp down to River Street, the tourists saw the still water, the three-story riverboat Georgia Queen docked alongside the quay, the dark windows of the nineteenth-century storefronts lining the near side of the street. The groundskeeper saw the dead.
Most ghost tours—most ghost stories—were largely hogwash, but they often contained nuggets of truth. In this case, the guide had told the tragic tale of two tween girls who had disappeared less than a year ago. The police had barely bothered looking for them; the disappearance had never been solved. Their ghosts had allegedly been spotted over a dozen times in the last six months, always on the waterfront: they’d ask strangers for help, only to vanish when people tried to take a closer look. Hogwash—partly. The spirit in the stairwell was a newer one, young and scared, so the groundskeeper had investigated any disappearances reported in Savannah in the past year. In a newspaper article dated nine months back, he’d found a small paragraph mentioning the disappearance of two tween girls and instructing anyone with information to go to the police. Less than a week later, one girl had been found, traumatized but alive, at which point all information about the incident had dried up. The other girl, the groundskeeper reckoned, had never been found and was likely dead.
What there were of the spirit’s memories fit such a story. It remembered neither life nor death, only the confused terror of its last moments. The clearest glimpse the groundskeeper had gotten was the frightened face of a girl: the one who’d been found. This, then, might well be the girl who hadn’t.
He’d returned to the waterfront this morning to find out. To send her on, if he could, into whatever awaited in the hereafter, before she did something worse than break a tourist’s leg.
“Layla Brown,” he said.
The spirit twisted toward him. He let out a soft breath. Finally. The right name. A name alone often wasn’t enough to calm a spirit, but names had power, his mam had always said. This spirit’s name had been buried nearly as deep as his own: Peter Shaughnessy, a name no one now living knew and the last connection he had—aside from an old pocket watch—to his family and the place he’d been born and raised and cursed.
“Layla Brown,” he repeated more forcefully.
The spirit shuddered. The nearest window splintered.
“Sure, there’s no need for that. Ain’t here to bother you none. Here to help, is all.”
She hung over him like a storm cloud. His heart stuttered, but he reassured himself that she couldn’t touch him. His messenger bag was filled with iron, salt, yellow flowers, various herbs.
She could bust a window over his head, though. If she was stronger than he thought, she could whip up a wind that’d send him tumbling down the steps, same as if she’d pushed him herself.
“Died bad, it seems,” he said softly. “Never found. That right?” The rot soured, her fear tinged with regret. She wasn’t strong enough to take form, but a faint whisper echoed in his ears. Even that much took more power than most ghosts had, but speech took less than corporeality.
Keisha.
And he knew what she wanted.
“They found Keisha,” he said. “Whatever happened to you, she didn’t share in it.”
The spirit wheeled and shifted. Wind moaned, ruffling his shirt and the caution tape behind him. Images flashed before his eyes like a slideshow. That same frightened face he’d seen before: Keisha. A rough hand gripping a thin wrist. The steps, slick with rain. A sudden burst of pain in her temple, a scream, sneakers squeaking. Then, nothing.
She was remembering her death.
The wind howled in the stairwell. The groundskeeper slipped, gripped the shaking handrail. Shivered, blinked the images away before they could overwhelm him.
“Layla!” he shouted. “Layla Brown!”
A window shattered. The groundskeeper ducked, hoping the building was empty at this hour. Glass rained on his cap. She’d gripped onto his words about what had happened to her, same as she’d held tight to her fear the past nine months. If he didn’t remind her of something else soon, there’d be no calming her.
He dug into his messenger bag, searching for the beaded bracelet he’d stashed there yesterday afternoon. He hadn’t wanted to use it, if he didn’t have to, aware of its importance and concerned so small a thing might be destroyed or lost in the confrontation.
“Layla Brown,” he repeated, more forcefully than ever as the wind threatened to swallow his voice. The caution tape fluttered, ripped itself from its fastenings, and blew away. “Look here.”
He thrust the bracelet out.
The wind died. The windows stopped rattling. The handrail stilled. A thin, butter-yellow strand of affection threaded through the greenish brown of the spirit’s fear.
A new memory emerged. Two girls, younger, maybe ten or so, singing loudly and off-key to a pop song as they braided embroidery floss into friendship bracelets. They shouted out the chorus and fell giggling to the ground, pelting each other with lettered beads.
The bracelet in the groundskeeper’s hand was grubbier now. The embroidery floss was fraying; the lettering on one of the beads had worn away. But it was still legible.
Best friends 4ever.
Keisha Adeyemi had tied it to a fence post during the candlelight vigil for Layla Brown held outside their middle school not two days ago.
“Keisha’s all right,” the groundskeeper said. “Newspaper didn’t say much but that she’d been found, but she left that for you.”
The spirit softened. The rotten fearful smell lessened, the feeling of sludge on his tongue with it. He breathed deep. Used to it, he was, after dealing with the dead for so long, but it was a relief nonetheless when they calmed down.
“She’s all right,” he repeated. “But you been scaring people— hurt some of ’em, too. Aye, you have.”
She rattled a window, not as vigorously as before, annoyed with the accusation. She’d never hurt anyone in her life, she insisted.
“In life, maybe not. Now you have. Best for you and everyone else if you let go of all that fear and move on, now you know Keisha’s all right.”
The handrail groaned, swaying back and forth. The nearest support rattled, then ripped out of the ground, bending the rail and leaving a crack behind. For a moment, he thought he was losing her again.
Then the shaking stopped.
Eyeing the ghost, the groundskeeper bent to examine the crack. Wedged into the stone was a friendship bracelet matching the one in his hand. More of the lettering was worn away; the braiding was frayed and broken. The groundskeeper plucked it carefully from the stone with a handkerchief, like it was made of diamonds and pearls instead of embroidery floss and plastic beads. The spirit sighed around him.
“This one’s yours, is it?” She confirmed it. He hesitated. “You understand,” he said, “likely they won’t find who done this to you even if I send it along.”
She agreed, going gray like the Spanish moss draping Savannah’s many live oaks. Not scared, now. Just sad and regretful, wishing she weren’t dead.
The groundskeeper ignored that particular wish. His own wants, to the extent he allowed himself any, tended the opposite way. He empathized with the dead, understood them. But he envied them, too.
“No helping that, now. I’ll make sure whoever you want to have it gets it. Promise. But you got to let go. All right?”
She twisted over the twin bracelets in his hands, faintly yellow again. Glad to know her friend was okay, if nothing else.
He wished he could do more for her. Spirits of children were his least favorites. Not because of the spirits themselves—they were no worse, nor better, than any others. He just didn’t like knowing how young they’d died, and so often terribly.
“Tell me about Keisha,” he said.
She didn’t speak, of course. Instead, she shared memories. Two girls on the swing set, daring each other to jump off the higher they flew. Painting each other’s nails in a bright purple bedroom. Holding hands, skipping home from school in the rain. In every memory, both of them, together.
The groundskeeper’s insides twisted. It’d been a long time since he’d been that close with anyone. He said nothing, did nothing, merely stood as silent witness to the ghost’s memories of the friend she was leaving behind.
The spirit glowed softly gold, shimmering like morning mist.
As the memories faded, she faded alongside them, until at last she winked out.
The stairwell was dark and empty, the air clear. Layla Brown’s fear had gone along with her.
The groundskeeper breathed deep, feeling like a weight had lifted off him. For a moment, he was satisfied. Another spirit sent on, at peace now, he hoped. Living folks saved further trouble, even if none of them realized it.
Then he looked at the bent handrail, the busted support, the shattered glass, and he sighed. Easier to deal with a haunting’s aftermath when the spirit was confined to a cemetery, where there was less to destroy and destruction could more easily be explained by natural phenomenon.
He stuck the support back in the stone and reattached the rail, swept the glass to the side. He found the caution tape a ways down the street. Best he could, he hung it back across the stairwell’s entrance before trudging uphill and uptown to tie the two friendship bracelets back on the fence by the school.
Excerpted from THE KEEPER OF LONELY SPIRITS by E.M. Anderson. Copyright © 2025 by E.M. Anderson. Published by MIRA, an imprint of HTP/HarperCollins.
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