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Foreword

I discovered the work of Antonio R. Garcez while vacationing in Santa Fe. We were going to be there for the better part of a week, and although I’d brought along several books to read at night in our hotel, none of them really interested me, and I spent that first evening watching television. The next morning, in the hotel’s gift shop, I came across a volume titled, American Indian Ghost Stories of the Southwest. The cover featured what appeared to be an Apache skeleton riding a horse through the desert night, with lightning flashing across the sky above two, tall, silhouetted saguaros. I bought it immediately.

I started reading the book that afternoon. After a busy morning sight seeing, window shopping, and taking an historic walking tour, we ate lunch at one of Santa Fe’s many renowned restaurants and then returned to the hotel for a brief rest before heading up Canyon Road to visit art galleries. My three-year-old son was on the bed in the room, taking a nap, and my wife was next to me on the balcony outside of our suite, thumbing through one of the tourist magazines the hotel had provided. It was a warm day, and from down below I could hear the sounds of traffic and brief snatches of conversation from other visitors walking by. It was not an atmosphere conducive to fright, yet as I sat there in the sun, I had chills.

I was reading the story of Sofita Becera, in a chapter titled “Historic Santa Fe, ”the tale of a woman haunted by a spirit attached to a stolen molcajete (a stone mortar used by Native Americans to grind herbs and spices), and the incidents that occurred to her closely paralleled fictional events from my recently published novel, The Return. Only, what happened to Sofita Becera was much creepier than anything in my book.

I sped through the rest of American Indian Ghost Stories of the Southwest, thrilled by the unique tales within the volume. I was impressed with Garcez’s clear, straight forward writing style and his ability to draw out from people their personal supernatural experiences—so impressed, that I wrote him a fan letter immediately upon returning home to California. We’ve been corresponding ever since, and I have since read Adobe Angels: The Ghosts of Santa Fe and Taos, his excellent compilation of north-central New Mexico ghost stories, and have been eagerly looking forward to reading his other books.

So when Antonio sent me a copy of Ghost Stories of Arizona and asked if I would like to write an introduction to the new edition of the book, I jumped at the chance.

If anything, the stories in this book are even scarier than those in Antonio’s New Mexico books. Maybe I’m prejudiced, because I’m from Arizona and am thus more familiar with the locations of these hauntings, but to my mind, these narratives are more intrinsically frightening than those of his previous collections—the ghostly encounters are creepier, more threatening. While reading several of the accounts, I found myself experiencing that delicious frisson that comes from a truly terrifying tale. And I’m not a person who’s easily spooked.

The most exciting thing about this volume, however, is that when I read it for the first time, nearly all of the stories were new to me. These aren’t the recycled myths of my childhood; those urban, suburban, and rural legends appropriated by Arizonans and transplanted to their state, like the Big Foot knock off, The Mogollon Monster, or La Llorona, a New Mexican ghost (who, in the bastardized version I heard, haunted the open canals of Phoenix in the 1960s). No, the tales here are quirkier, more intimate, more obscure, and what grants them the stamp of authenticity, what makes them not only believable but also truly chilling, is the fact that they’re not typical, traditional ghost stories with pat explanations and simplistic cause-and-effect plot lines. Nearly all of these hauntings are open-ended, the cause and origins of the sightings are not neatly spelled out, and the occurrences are not tied up with easy resolutions. Rather, they’re random incidents, resonating with the vague, inexplicable logic of the unknown. There are a few famous hauntings—the Cooper Queen Hotel in Bisbee, two buildings in Jerome—but for the most part, the focus is on unfamiliar episodes in out-of-the-way locations, and that’s what gives this book its singular power.

While the work of Antonio R. Garcez is extremely interesting and entertaining, particularly to those of us who enjoy a good scare, I also believe it performs an important historical/sociological function: setting down the unwritten history of an overlooked subject—paranormal experiences in the Southwest. Although he’s a terrific writer, I think it’s Antonio’s skills as an interviewer and oral historian that set his work apart from other chroniclers of the paranormal, many of whom seem to rely on third hand recitations of events, rather than going straight to the source. Antonio gets his information directly from the horse’s mouth, and allows the participants to tell their own stories in their own ways. He also does his homework, and in a few brief introductory paragraphs always manages to give a historical perspective and context to these individual experiences. In the case of this book, he illuminates many previously unknown incidents of ghostly phenomena, preserving for posterity accounts that would otherwise remain untold.

I won’t waste any more of your time singing the praises of Arizona Ghost Stories. It’s in your hands, and you’re about to turn the page and jump headlong into these tales of other worldly encounters by everyday people. Suffice it to say that you are in for a treat, and whether or not you believe in the supernatural, I suggest you set aside a large enough block of time to read the entire book, because you’re not going to be able to put it down. Oh, and make sure you leave the light on.

—Bentley Little