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Described as ideal for fans of UNDER THE WHISPERING DOOR by T.J. Klune, the sweet comfort of THE VERY SECRET SOCIETY OF IRREGULAR WITCHES
is combined with the endearing grump of A MAN CALLED OVE,
in this cozy fantasy about an immortal ghost hunter who must forgive himself
for his tragic past in order to embrace his found family.
Title: The Keeper Of Lonely Spirits
Author: E.M. Anderson
Publisher: MIRA
Release Date: 25th March 2025
BLURB
In this mesmerizing, wonderfully moving queer cozy fantasy, an immortal ghost hunter must confront his tragic past in order to embrace his found family.
Find an angry spirit. Send it on its way before it causes trouble. Leave before anyone learns his name.
After over two hundred years, Peter Shaughnessy is ready to die and end this cycle. But thanks to a youthful encounter with one o’ them folk in his native Ireland, he can’t. Instead, he’s cursed to wander eternally far from home, with the ability to see ghosts and talk to plants.
Immortality means Peter has lost everyone he’s ever loved. And so he centers his life on the dead—until his wandering brings him to Harrington, Ohio. As he searches for a vengeful spirit, Peter’s drawn into the townsfolk’s lives, homes and troubles. For the first time in over a century, he wants something other than death.
But the people of Harrington will die someday. And he won’t.
As Harrington buckles under the weight of the supernatural, the ghost hunt pits Peter’s well-being against that of his new friends and the man he’s falling for. If he stays, he risks heartbreak. If he leaves, he risks their lives.
PURCHASE LINKS
HarperCollins
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Bookshop.org
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E.M. Anderson (she/they) is a queer, neurodivergent writer and the author of The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher. Her work has appeared in SJ Whitby’s Awakenings: A Cute Mutants Anthology, Wyldblood Press's From the Depths: A Fantasy Anthology, and Dark Horses: The Magazine of Weird Fiction. They have two master’s degrees and a feral passion for trees, birds, pole fitness, and Uncle Iroh.
AUTHOR LINKS
Author Website: https://www.elizmanderson.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elizmanderson/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elizmanderson/
Tumblr: https://elizmanderson.tumblr.com/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/elizmanderson.com
EXCERPT
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
