You may have heard rumors about what happens after the sun sets on the Small Islands in the Caribbean. You may also dismiss those rumors as nothing more than legends and folklore. But whether you believe in the supernatural or not, there’s no denying that a strange pattern of unexplained disappearances has plagued the Small Islands for years.

And if you ask high school senior Lystra Reed, she’ll tell you that there’s often more to these stories than meets the eye. Sure, her friends have called her superstitious in the past, but we feel inclined to believe her.

Perhaps we only feel that way due to her skill at crafting tales of horror to tell around a campfire. The kind of skill that can only be honed from an intimate familiarity with the dark.

Either way, if you visit her during her shift at the library, we’re sure that she’d love to tell you all about the mysteries of the Small Islands and point you toward further research.

That is, if she’s in a sociable mood . . . which is a big if these days.

So, before you talk to her, you might want to at least understand the basics of the following cases:

Daniel Markham

A forty-two-year-old fisherman whose abandoned boat was found floating off the coast of Annatto. Markham’s parents attempted to have Daniel legally declared dead. After multiple failed searches and a year of no contact, the courts denied the declaration.

This was because three different witnesses claimed to have seen Daniel alive on Annatto. All these sightings were from a distance, and Daniel fled every time he was seen. But one of the witnesses was Daniel’s brother, so that sighting made doubts about Daniel’s identification harder to dispute.

Phillip the Whaler

A book at the library from an unnamed author of the Small Islands describes the circumstances under which his friend Phillip, a whaler, suddenly went missing. The author had assumed that Phillip was dead, having met some fatal accident on the water.

Fifteen years later, the author returned to Annatto Island with a fishing crew. They spent a night on the island. As the other fishermen slept, Phillip appeared to his old friend. They talked for a few hours, catching up and reminiscing. Phillip would not answer any questions about where he’d been, nor why he hadn’t aged a day.

As dawn broke and the other fishermen awoke, Phillip disappeared again. The author claimed to have recognized the strangeness of the situation at the time, but his desire to talk to his old friend overruled his fear. He believed Phillip was an apparition—something unearthly in Phillip’s appearance, though he could not identify what. In the book, he writes: For what the eyes did recognize, the heart did call stranger.

Sister Marie Leroy

One of the nuns who volunteered to help treat patients of the Annatto Island colony suffering from Hansen’s disease from 1929 to 1981.

Because proper treatment for Hansen’s disease wasn’t available during that time, patients had to give up their families, friends, homes, and jobs to be quarantined on the island, where they’d live the rest of their days.

The nuns who volunteered to care for the patients were also aware that, by taking this on, it would lead to isolation and very likely their death, too. Almost all the sisters contracted the disease eventually.

Sister Leroy went missing in December of 1978. After several searches of the island, it was believed that she died while swimming, the currents pulling her body out to sea.

In the proceeding years, the mysterious circumstances of Marie’s disappearance transformed into a ghost story, shared among the patients and staff. Many of them reported sightings of her spirit on the island, dressed in her long white tunic and wimple, protecting the quarantine area from unwanted visitors.

The Dutton Family

Natives of the island of Malva, the Duttons were a family of chicken farmers. About a year ago, most members of the family died in a horrifically gruesome way. All within less than a month.

An electrocution, a stabbing, two car crashes, and a drowning—all ruled deaths by accident or misadventure.

The prevailing rumor is that the Duttons practiced magic and made their millions through a deal with a jumbie, a supernatural creature native to the Caribbean.

Jumbies supposedly exist in many forms—killing, possessing, haunting, and making dangerous Faustian bargains with humans since the beginning of time. It’s not uncommon for the wealthy to be accused of making their money through dark deals with them. Allegedly, the Dutton family’s deal with a jumbie went horribly wrong, and the creature came back to collect . . .

What do all these stories have in common? Well, mostly that they’re all decent fodder for ghost stories to tell your friends late at night. But that’s only if you don’t believe there’s something more than meets the eye happening on the Small Islands.

The real question is, why does Lystra suddenly care about these strange deaths and disappearances so much? Well, she’s certainly not telling you. But we can’t help but wonder if it’s deeply personal . . . and extremely urgent.

Meet Lystra and learn more about the mysteries of the Small Islands in Rick Riordan Presents: It Lurks in the Night by Sarah Dass, on sale now.