Low-lying forest landscapes are rapidly converting to saltwater marshes and swamps along the eastern seaboard of the United States due to climate change. This process is producing a particular forest type that biologists refer to as a “ghost forest." These forests, which are characterized by the synchronous mass death of trees, are particularly striking figures of the climate run amok, and they have recently gained widespread attention as dramatic signs of the near climatic future. This paper describes an ethnographic encounter with dead trees in the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula of coastal North Carolina that begins at the coast, moves inland through the ghost forests, then into the industrial pine plantations and massive corporate farms that run across the peninsula. This movement will put the speculative futures of pine plantations and industrial agriculture in the same analytical plane as the spectral futures indexed by vast stands of dead trees.