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on the ground, and other times you might find it in your car or clothes the next day. Some versions call for pennies, others quarters. We have brought both, each covered with our initials in red fingernail polish.
    “Which way are we supposed to face?” asks Joe.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Are we supposed to face the road … or the water?”
    “I don’t know,” I answer. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
    “I’m facing the road,” Curry interjects. “If this ghost kid is going to knock me in, I want to see him coming.”
    “I thought you didn’t believe in any of this.”
    “Well, fuck you guys then. He’ll push you in first.”
    The thing I’ll remember most about the moment that follows is how quiet it is. No breeze, no insect or animal sounds, and none of the chatter you associate with being out in the woods at night. Nothing. It is absolutely and completely stilland silent. It’s as if someone suddenly has pressed a Pause button and life has simply stopped.
    Then Joe whispers that he sees someone in the woods coming toward us.
    “Look over in the trees. Someone’s shining a flashlight up the path.”
    Curry and I swing our heads over, and then we see it too. It’s like a lightning flash inside the forest, and then it’s gone.
    I think to myself: Who would be walking down a dark path in the woods in the middle of the night? The trails around the reservoir simply run in giant loops going nowhere. There are no houses or parked cars for at least four miles in either direction. Anyone or anything out on that path probably has even less of a reasonable excuse for being there than we do.
    A few seconds later we see it again—a bright light swinging in our direction, then gone. It’s maybe thirty yards down the bank of the reservoir.
    “Oh, shit,” Curry states flatly.
    “What do we do?” asks Joe.
    “You can start by keeping your voice down.”
    “Oh, shit,” Curry repeats softly.
    We see two flashlights pointing toward us, then back toward the lake.
    Then we realize that they aren’t flashlights at all but headlights. Headlights from a car winding along Clinton Road, going very fast and heading directly for us.
    My first thought is that the car would come around the hairpin curve, see three sketchy-looking dudes standing on the bridge, freak out, go out of control, and slam through the barriers, thus taking its passengers, us, and whatever else is lurking around that bridge straight into a watery grave.
    “What do we do?” Joe repeats.
    “I don’t know,” I offer. The car’s less than twenty yards from turning onto the bridge and isn’t slowing down.
    “How about we duck?” Curry suggests.
    “Duck?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Now?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Okay. Three … two … one, duck!”
    With that, we all slam against the ground behind the Jersey barrier, just as the car skids around the corner, tears up and over the bridge, and then speeds away into the night.
    “Man, I can’t believe we hid,” I say, brushing little bits of Clinton Road from the front of my shirt and pants a minute later. “We’re lucky it didn’t lose control.”
    “Let’s try the coins.”
    “Eric should go first,” Curry says.
    I should. The three of us have traveled here so that I can do just that.
    As I raise my hand, I can feel a heavy rush in my chest. I would have expected that I’d feel scared, but this time it isn’t fear. It feels more like sadness. Or maybe it’s just a sudden memory of sadness.
    You see, this is less a story about ghosts than it is a story about what it means to be haunted.
    As much as I want to encounter the boy at the bridge, or a haunted Camaro, or any of the hundreds of other horrible things that we’re supposed to stumble across up and down Clinton Road, I know no coins are ever going to come back. But I’m still scared. I’m scared to begin facing the truth. Not the truth of Clinton Road, but the truth of me.
    You might think that standing there on the reservoir