Cover design by Hannah Perrine Mode
Ghosts in the Forest
A Kindle Single
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In 2004, 34 men, women and children stepped out of a Southeast Asian rainforest and presented themselves as refugees from violence engulfing their native Cambodia. They did not know that the war they were fleeing had in fact ended—25 years earlier.
I was one of the first journalists to meet the families when they emerged from the forest. Three years later, I returned to Cambodia to learn the truth about their time on the run. What I found was a darker and more complicated tale than the one they first shared, a story of terror, isolation, fierce loyalty, appalling choices and murder. Ghosts in the Forest examines the unyielding human need for family and connection and the meaning of survival.
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The book was featured on the Huffington Post, ABC Radio Australia, and the Phnom Penh Post. You can read an excerpt at Public Radio International.
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In 2009, the photographs I took in northeast Cambodia during the book's reporting were featured in a solo exhibit at the International Center in New York entitled "People of the Spirit Forest: Photographs of Life Among Cambodia's Highland Tribes." The photographs can be viewed here. They are now on permanent display at the Newburg Children's Museum in Newburg, Missouri.
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