The Séance Garden

by Juliet Blackwell

Genres: Ghost; General Fiction; Horror; Thrillers; Supernatural suspense

Synopsis

After a cheesy ghost tour in one of California’s oldest towns stumbles upon an actual haunting, a skeptical historian of the occult becomes entangled in solving a murder case.

When Professor Harper Grae loses a bet with a friend, she finds herself on a local nighttime tour of “haunted” locations in Monterey. Harper’s a lifelong non-believer in the occult, though her academic career is devoted to the historical and societal significance of witchcraft, ghosts, and medicinal poisons of all sorts. But her skepticism immediately gets tested when the tour stumbles on the body of local artist Delilah Mason—who’s found murdered on the grounds of a nearly two-hundred-year-old mansion, once home to the infamous Perles family.

On the night Mason’s body is found, Harper catches sight of something in the house that she can’t shake, something that’s impossible to explain, at least not rationally. Soon the murder investigation reveals that this is the second time a woman has been found murdered beneath a sprawling cypress tree in the gardens of the Perles Mansion. And when Harper’s closest friend is questioned by the police, Harper fears the authorities will fail to uncover the real killer.

As Harper asks questions around town and digs deeper into the supernatural speculation and rumors surrounding the murders—two women killed in similar circumstances, separated by nearly two centuries —she sees evidence she can’t ignore that the notorious mansion truly is haunted by the ghost of Isabel Perles.

What will it cost Harper to rethink everything she’s always believed to admit that the veil between the living and the dead might actually be crossed?

Release date: July 28, 2026

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 400

Sample

One

Monterey, California

Present day

As one of the oldest towns in California, Monterey is home to ghosts and ghouls of all types!" intoned the leader of the ghost tour. His voice dropped to a theatrical whisper. "Look around you, and open yourselves up to the possibilities, and you just might realize that ghosts are everywhere."

Harper fixed her gaze on the restaurant's shiny brass-framed front door, willing her friend Tariq to walk in. Where the hell was he? He was the reason she was here tonight, waiting for a ghost tour she did not want to go on in the first place.

It was her own damned fault. She should have known better than to make a bet after drinking too much sparkling wine at her birthday party. She was no kid, after all. Which was the point: Harper had just turned forty. Forty. Hard to know whether to celebrate embarking on a new decade, or to mourn the too-rapid passing of the years.

But she had made the bet, and she had lost, and she was a woman of her word. So now here she sat, in a historic Fisherman's Wharf restaurant, along with the other participants of Joel's Amazing and Wondrous Ghost Tour of Old Monterey. A full moon sent silvery light streaming in through the wall of windows overlooking the glistening, serene Monterey Bay. The incessant barking of nearby sea lions could be heard over the clink of silverware and glasses in the busy establishment, where garish neon lights promoted beers and promised a good time, and tacky Halloween decorations-spiderwebs, jack-o'-lanterns, and witches on brooms-abounded.

Harper glanced at her phone. Ten more minutes, and if Tariq doesn't show, I'm out of here. Losing a bet was one thing, but she'd be damned if she would attend this event alone.

The other tour participants were abuzz with anticipation at the thought of encountering a ghost, their expressions somewhere between excited and nervous. There was a mother and her teenage daughter visiting from Iowa; a very affectionate couple from France on their honeymoon; an older, retired couple from Arizona; a tall, muscled man with a thick five-o'clock shadow who scowled and seemed as out of place as Harper; and a rather breathless twentysomething blonde who talked a lot about being a "teensy bit psychic." Such was their group of intrepid ghost hunters this evening.

"May I have your attention please, everyone," declared the ghost tour guide, clapping his hands. Boyishly handsome, with a slight build and artistically tousled dark brown hair, Joel Aristide appeared to be in his mid-thirties. He was dressed for tonight's tour in an anachronistic Victorian ensemble featuring a black top hat, a white shirt with billowy sleeves, and a waistcoat of green velvet. As a concession to the Halloween season, he had draped an orange scarf featuring black cat silhouettes around his neck, and in one hand he held a bright orange aluminum water bottle emblazoned with witches on broomsticks and the slogan: "I ain't afraid of no ghosts."

"From long before the Gold Rush of 1849, to the Roaring Twenties, to today," said Joel, "our fair city has been host to scandals, fortunes won and lost, jealousy, and intrigue. But before we begin, I must ask: Do any of you consider yourselves . . ." He paused for dramatic effect, leaning forward and tilting his head as though listening to voices only he could hear. "Sensitive?"

The members of the tour group tittered and exchanged glances.

"By 'sensitive,'" Joel clarified, "I mean, of course, sensitive to the spirit world beyond the veil?"

The young blond woman raised her hand and said, "Maybe, like, a teensy bit?"

"Excellent!" said Joel with gusto. He had an annoying habit of bouncing on the balls of his feet, up and down, up and down. "And perhaps the rest of you will discover tonight heretofore unacknowledged sensitivities to the spirit world. One never knows."

Harper gave in to a yawn, trying her best to hide it behind her hand, when she felt an elbow digging into her ribs.

"Are we having fun yet?" whispered Tariq, slightly out of breath and carrying the scent of the cold briny air blowing off Monterey Bay.

"Where have you been?" Harper whispered. "You leave me here, alone and defenseless, to face Joel-the-Wondrous-Ghost-Tour-Leader?"

"Give the guy a chance," Tariq murmured. "You might enjoy yourself. Stranger things have happened."

"If anyone sees me here, my already questionable reputation will be ruined."

"Is that why you're in disguise?" Tariq smiled, noting the knit hat she had pulled down around her ears and the dark-rimmed glasses she didn't normally wear.

"It's cold. And my contacts were bothering me."

"Uh-huh."

"People are taking photos, and nothing remains a secret anymore with social media. My colleagues would not be amused."

"You're being paranoid."

"I'm being realistic."

"That's what paranoids always say," Tariq said, looking around the restaurant as Joel nattered on. "Besides, don't you refuse to engage with social media?"

"The moment those social platforms are run by smart women who give away most of their ill-gotten gains for fear of being damned to hell, as exceedingly rich people have done throughout the millennia, I'll create a social media account. I may even participate."

Tariq let out a loud bark of a laugh.

Joel halted his spiel and, eyebrows raised, stared pointedly at the pair of them.

"Sorry," Tariq murmured.

"Is everything all right?" Joel asked.

"Quite," Harper replied with a fake smile, though "everything" was decidedly not all right. From what she'd heard so far, Joel had chosen his ghostly tales from the silliest, most credulous popular books and websites. She should know; she was familiar with them. She was Doctor Harper Grae, a professor of history specializing in the folklore of ghosts, witchcraft, and all manner of undead. She had worked hard to complete her degree and establish an academic career. It had cost her one job, her marriage, and the opportunity to have children and a home. But it was worth it because history wasn't trivial.

History mattered.

"Ready, ghost hunters? Let's go!" Joel said, bouncing up and down a few times before leading the group out of the restaurant and down the historic Fisherman's Wharf toward the oldest part of town, where several two-story adobe structures held pride of place around a public plaza.

"Here we have the Old Custom House, which is the oldest surviving government building in California, erected in 1827 by the Spanish," said Joel.

"Probably it was built by the indigenous people, forced to work for the Spaniards, right?" asked the teenage girl.

"I, um, well, I'm not exactly sure. What I do know is that it is said to be haunted by the victims of two gruesome murders: a man and a boy who were killed while guarding the secret location of buried gold. Here in Monterey, Indians and explorers, priests and pirates, foreigners, farmers, and fishermen . . ." Joel intoned. He apparently deemed the phrase worthy of repetition and said again, "Yes, Indians and explorers, priests and pirates, foreigners, farmers, and fishermen . . ."

". . . and a partridge in a pear tree," Harper muttered.

"Each left their immutable imprint on our little town, be it for good or . . . for evil." Like all good showmen, Joel made a point of pausing to make eye contact with each member of the tour. "Intrigues, swindles, secret affairs, hangings, and shipwrecks . . . this town has seen them all and then some! Shall we then be surprised that we are home to so many restless spirits?"

"I don't know. Shall we?" Harper grumbled under her breath, trailing the tour group as it shuffled past a modern conference center and hotel.

"You promised to be good," whispered Tariq with a low chuckle.

"I promised no such thing. Only that I would go on this ridiculous ghost tour with you. A bet's a bet."

"Don't gamble if you can't afford to lose," Tariq said sagely, smiling at Harper's glare. "Why are you in such a mood lately?"

"What was it that Cate Blanchett said? 'Never pick a fight with a woman older than forty. They're full of rage and sick of everyone's shit.' Something along those lines."

"You just turned forty yesterday."

"I've always been precocious."

"Is there a problem back there?" Joel stared pointedly at Harper and Tariq like a teacher admonishing mischievous second graders on a field trip. The group had halted in front of a large Victorian building fronted with bay windows: the historic Monterey Hotel.

"Not at all," said Tariq, flashing his bright white, slightly crooked smile. It had won him forgiveness on more than one occasion, including having shown up late to meet Harper.

"Our apologies," Harper said to Joel. "Please, carry on. You were discussing the spirit that lives in the Monterey Hotel? Fred, is it?"

"Yes. Fred was a carpenter and for years worked for the hotel. He died long ago, but to this day he has been seen fixing the main staircase. To say thank you, the hotel staff keep an altar to him in the basement, well supplied with chocolate and cigarettes, coins, and the occasional bottle of fine Kentucky bourbon." Joel winked and bounced a couple of times. "I've half a mind to fix those stairs myself!"

A few chuckles rippled through the tour group, and Joel preened. Bounce, bounce.

The tall, beefy man raised his hand and growled, "Is it true that ghosts are more likely to appear in cases of violent death?"

"Excellent question, Mario!" Joel said. "According to the experts, there are many reasons a spirit might remain earthbound instead of transitioning beyond the veil. But-alas!-as with all experts, they never seem to agree on a single cause."

The tour group snickered, and Harper found herself paying more attention.

"What the various theories do have in common is the idea that the person who passed had unfinished business and cannot move on to the next plane of existence until that business is in some way resolved."

"Resolved by the ghost or by someone else?" the teenager asked.

"Ah," Joel said. "Perhaps we will discover the answer to that question tonight!"

Harper peered up and down busy Alvarado Street, hoping not to spy any familiar faces. Monterey was not a large town. She had a hard enough time being taken seriously by her academic colleagues; the last thing she needed was for one of them to spot her on a cheesy ghost tour.

"Now if you will all kindly follow me this way," Joel said.

As the tour meandered down the street, Joel regaled them with ever more dramatic tales of tragic deaths, betrayals, and hauntings, then halted again in front of an incongruously modern convenience store.

"Ladies and gentlemen, what you see before you is a shining example of twentieth-century architecture, no? But it was not always thus. Ah yes, on this very spot once stood the cottage of an old woman who lived here during the typhoid epidemic of 1842. She buried one grandchild after another until, at long last, they were all dead and she herself succumbed to the dreaded scourge. And now from time to time she appears in the corner of the parking lot, there beneath the tree, wailing for her lost grandbabies . . . Or so some say . . ."

The tourists peered into the dark corner of the lot, a few tsking and shaking their heads in sympathy.

"Or so some say," Harper echoed, annoyed by the vagueness of Joel's tales of alleged hauntings. She noticed a mud smear on Tariq's otherwise impeccable shirt. "What have you been doing? Crawling through bushes?"

"Had to help Penny with a feisty otter at the aquarium. But c'mon, Harper, admit it: This is fun."

"Oh, you betcha. A haunted convenience store parking lot? I live for this sort of thing. I especially liked the ten minutes we spent staring at some invisible footprints. Give that some thought: Invisible. Footprints."

Making good on her bet wasn't the only reason Harper had agreed to go on the ghost tour. She also hoped to learn some colorful local history. She was new in town, and though she had gone to graduate school in Berkeley, she had never had the time or the money to visit this area of the California coast. The region had a rich history before the Europeans arrived, but the native peoples had not left grand structures, and much of their story had been lost or destroyed. There remained only a few remnants of Old California; the vast majority had been torn down in favor of convenience stores and strip malls. Still, the traces were there for those who cared to look for them.

California history was not Harper's specialty, however. She researched the folklore surrounding death and un-death, and the history of witchcraft, which her scholarly articles referred to as "the ultimate othering of peoples through the centuries," as well as the related field of botanical poisons. But Monterey College's newest faculty member, Harper Grae, was a jill-of-all-trades, offering history courses ranging from large surveys to small seminars that explored the story of past peoples and the choices they made: the good and the bad, the shockingly immoral and the stunningly admirable.

For the next hour, as the tour group visited various sites of alleged hauntings-Colton Hall, Stokes Adobe, the Robert Louis Stevenson House-Harper's skepticism was reinforced by the lack of specifics in the ghostly tales Joel was spinning. It was all "some say" this and "according to legend" that. Harper was about to suggest to Tariq that they bail and get something to drink when the tour arrived at its final stop: the Perles Mansion.

She perked up. This could be interesting.

Harper had lingered over photographs of the historic home in a volume of local history. Nearly two centuries old, the Perles Mansion was a sprawling two-story house-"mansion" was more of a courtesy title-made of adobe brick and exposed wood.

Adobe bricks, she had read, were a mixture of clay, sand, and straw. The bricks would last for centuries if protected from the elements, but they did not allow for many embellishments or fine details. The Perles Mansion was beautiful in its way, but crude compared to the fairy-tale Victorian cottages and Edwardian manors of San Francisco.

Nonetheless, there was something undeniably intriguing about the place. A high adobe wall surrounded the mansion, whose main facade was partially hidden from the street by the branches of an enormous Monterey cypress. Harper craned her neck to get a better view over the garden wall and spotted a dim golden light emanating from an upstairs room. The silhouette of a person passed by the window.

Harper envied whoever lived in such a home, fairly vibrating with history, supernatural or otherwise.