Photographer Kit Castagne provided a series of powerful photos of anti-racism protests in San Francisco, California, for publication in Berkeley street paper Street Spirit.

Thanks to coronavirus, says one Street Spirit writer who is homeless, the majority of the USA is getting an idea of day to day life for the homeless community.

Quiver Watts, editor of San Francisco’s Street Sheet, writes that the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak not only poses a greater risk to the city’s population living in poverty, but argues that they will be made “a convenient scapegoat to take attention off the real failures in the city’s emergency response”.

Some residents of Downtown Oakland might recognise Derrick Hayes from the mural of him that adorns the building at 14th and Franklin; others might know him as the familiar face that sells Street Spirit from his various pitches in the area. He is a man who radiates friendliness, treasures the community around him and who talks candidly and emotionally about the journey that has brought him to the present moment.

Previously, INSP brought stories from those living on the streets of Berkeley, published in the city’s street paper Street Spirit, that told tales of paranormal experiences, brushes with what could have been actual ghosts and, more eerily, the ghosts of memory. Here are two more pieces of writing, also by people who have experience of homelessness, which talk more about the truthful horrors that can occur while homeless.

To coincide with Halloween, Berkeley, California’s Street Spirit asked those who lived on the city’s streets for chilling, ghostly stories intersecting with their experiences of homelessness.