The Ghost Frog

Halloween Sideshow 2025

The páramo mists of Cerro de la Muerte drifted like wandering spirits among the dark forests of the Talamanca highlands when my little car climbed up and over the backbone of the mountain range, following the Pan-American highway to a forest where the dead had risen. A few hours earlier, I had slipped out in the dark and left my six-month-old daughter sleeping with her mother in her abuelita’s house to drive out of the city and up and over the mountain of death, six hours south to meet a herpetologist and a BriBri guide somewhere in the forests of the southern Talamancas to go looking for a frog.

It was a species I had only seen in photographs: dark black body, marbled with bands of red and orange and yellow, long legs and arms and sharp nose pointed to the sky. Its Latin name was Atelopus varius; in Spanish it was la rana arlequín; in English, the variable harlequin frog. I had seen images of them in natural history textbooks and in the field notebooks of the biologists who had criss-crossed the Costa Rican tropics in the old days: lone frogs perched on wet rocks by the creek-side glimmering with water beads like jewels. Lately, I had begun to see them everywhere: I saw them in Picasso’s paintings in the long halls of empty art museums, in the aposematic vestments of viceroy butterflies flitting in and out of willow trees, in the deadly rings of coral snakes, in the black pools of oblivion that filled my eyes at night. These images and their enchantments had been enough to draw me out into the empty city streets before the sun came up to set off on a long drive south into a lonely pilgrimage. It would be the first night that I would spend away from my daughter since she’d come into the world, six months and five days earlier at the end of a baking summer when the monsoon thunderstorms had swept down from beyond the mountains, washing the dry earth in rain: a baptism. I hoped the quarry that I sought would be worth the cost the journey levied, and that I might return to hold my daughter in a day without treading too deeply through the forests of the dead; the frog that I was looking for was a ghost.

The variable harlequin frog had disappeared from Costa Rica in the 1980s, part of a global amphibian decline attributed to a pathogenic chytrid fungus emboldened by a changing climate. Among the casualties of that calamity was the ethereal golden toad of Monteverde (Incilius periglenes), which I had spent the last six years searching for; I had traveled with the old guides and campesinos into the long-shuttered breeding grounds of the sapo dorado—local legend now, known only to tall tales and faded photo slides since it had vanished without a trace thirty years ago—but we had found no signs of the lost gold, hidden treasure, no survivors of the apocalypse. As the first rains descended on the highlands in the spring of 2021, I had hiked in with the last person to have seen the golden toad alive, back to the lonely mountain of transfiguration, where he had observed the very last of them thirty years before. That spring while I went in search of el dorado, I had left my wife in the quiet mountain town of Monteverde, where we had met and fallen in love; she had life growing inside of her, our son about the size of a blackberry, and she could not safely walk the trails that went along the backbone of eternity that I had meant to follow. When I came down from the mountain three days later empty-handed, we stood holding hands beside an ultrasound machine that listened and listened and listened for a heartbeat before finally finding nothing. Our son had continued drifting on, out to wherever the lost things go, and he was now another entry on a long list of things that we would never meet—one more spirit in a country full of ghosts.

Like the golden toad, many of the lost frogs that slipped between the veil of life and death during the great amphibian declines of the 1980s had stayed buried in the long years since their last appearances—but others had begun to reemerge. In the oak forests that grew on the slops of the Barva volcano north of San José, university students had rediscovered the missing Holdridge’s toad (Bufo holdridgei), a close relative of periglenes. On the Atlantic slope of Monteverde, where the streams run to the Caribbean, a local naturalist had quite by accident identified a remnant population of the green-eyed frog (Lithobates vibicarius), which had not been seen in close to twenty years. The population of variable harlequin frogs that I was traveling to see was one of just a handful that had been rediscovered in the last few years. A species once believed to be extinct was clawing its way back from the forests of the afterlife.

It was late in the morning when I met the biologist César Barrio-Amorós at a dusty crossroads somewhere outside of Perez Zeledón, in the Pacific foothills of the Talamanca mountains. Beginning in 2015—ten years after the first revenant population of the species had been reported in Costa Rica—César had been conducting surveys at different sites along the cordillera, from the coastal forests to the Panamanian border; out of the 169 historical localities of the species in Costa Rica, the frogs had reappeared at 8. Some of the populations were clinging on in patches of remote primary rainforest, on the wet banks and steep cliffs of streams and rivers; others were on private land, where dirt roads cut straight lines through the forests and farmland encroached around the margins. At some sites, César had spent more than 200 hours running nocturnal transects and searching for undiscovered populations. He had counted hundreds of toads, delineated different color morphs, and made behavioral observations to contribute to a better understanding of the re-emerging species. In some areas, he found dead frogs marred by the specter of the chytrid fungus; in others, he watched hurricanes trigger mudslides to choke the breeding streams. The world was continuing to change around the harlequins, as they peeked their heads out from the shadows of extinction.

We left the rural farm-roads and headed south on the Pan-American highway toward Buenos Aires, where we stopped at a Maxi Pali to buy disinfectant for our boots, then drove up into the mountains where the paved roads became dirt tracks and old farmers road on horseback up the hillsides. Listening to César’s stories, the beguiling calls of the resurrected frogs were becoming clearer, although they were in a language that I didn’t understand. César knew about that call; he had once spent two days on horseback to reach a secluded population of Atelopus, and he had funneled countless hours and colones into a decade spent on the trail of the frogs that had risen from the dead. In the wake of my own search for a ghost—the vanished golden toad, which was gone and would never sparkle in the bright pools at the top of the world again—the harlequin frog was a totem and a talisman: rebirth, reawakening, revival. To see them with my own eyes would be to find the witness marks of hope in the wasteland.

In the early afternoon, we met Oscar Ortiz, our guide, on the outskirts of the Örkö Bata. Oscar was one of several BriBri community members who made his living from the Indigenous forest reserve on the Pacific slope of the Talamancas; some were guides and others were drivers, some cut trails, some made crafts and sold them to the visiting tourists and biologists. Oscar’s wife and young son rode with us in his pickup truck, his son shouting “¡Agua! ¡Agua!” every time we crossed the tendrils of a stream coming down from hidden headwaters, as if it were the fountain of life. On the steep drive up the mountain, I asked Oscar if the BriBri had any stories about the harlequins—local legends, creation myths—but he told me that his language didn’t even have a name for them; the BriBri had come to these forests from the Caribbean side of the Talamancas, up and over the continental divide in more recent human memory, so there were many things that called these forests home—like the plato negro, black-headed Bushmaster, deadliest of snakes—for which they had no names.

Oscar parked the pickup truck at a large wooden gate at the edge of the reserve, and we walked the rest of the way down a steep path descending to the river-canyon. Oscar’s son bounced in his mother’s arms down the slick trail, watching me suspiciously, determining if I could be trusted. After half a mile or so, it grew clear that my rubber boots were about a size too small; I could feel the skin on my heels and big toe beginning to rub away; I resigned myself to a long and painful night.

When we reached the little cabin at the bottom of the canyon—big posts holding up a thatched roof, no walls, dirt floor—Oscar’s wife started making coffee and gallo pinto while we waited for evening to descend. Distant thunder portended a coming storm, but it roamed beyond the mountains like a blind hunting cat that had lost its way, no longer certain which direction it was heading. If it reached us here, the river would flood and a cabeza de agua would bring dark mud and detritus from upstream to wash away any hopes of finding the rare frogs that we sought.

But the storm moved off and the sun began to sink into the forest, so we put our headlamps on and Oscar said goodbye to his wife and son, and we set off down the thin path to the river. Along the banks, thick green moss covered heavy boulders and big heliconia leaves hung like long fingers reaching for the water. There was no trail along the river’s edge, so we walked in the sandy shallows and balanced on the big rocks that had been made smooth by decades of stillness. The sun came in patches through the high canopy above, last light of evening before nightfall.

César and Oscar were walking up ahead, both connected to this species in a different way. For César, the variable harlequin frogs were secret-keepers, possessing answers to the questions we were left with when the amphibian declines sent frogs from all across the world into hiding or annihilation, and they were valuable to him for what they might teach us—about disease and climate, ephemerality and resilience, extinction and resurrection. For Oscar, these frogs were his livelihood; he made his living ferrying biologists and photographers up and down the river in search of the famous ghost-frogs that had come back from the dead. They were both connected to the species, inexorably tied to them, and in one sense or another they would share their fate.

Only I was set apart from them, a foreigner who would enter these forests for only a few hours, leaving soon with stories or memories or photographs if I was lucky, a visitor whose only grail remained to see the variable harlequin frogs. I wanted nothing from them but to look at them, had nothing to ask of them aside from questions that I had no words for, questions about what might lie beyond the curtain of the world, a curtain they had peered through once, when they were very close to death, to see into the afterlife or whatever lies beyond. I wondered if they had seen a child there who was looking for his parents, or gotten word of him, that they might send back to me like a little boat down a big river, littered here and there with stones.

I saw my first variable harlequin frog just a little before sunset, when soft light warmed the rock-cliffs at the river’s edge. César had spotted it just above the water-line, and he called me over but he wouldn’t tell me exactly where it was; he wanted me to find it for myself. For maybe two minutes, I searched the shadows under the rocks, the little hollows where I thought a small frog might be hiding from the perils of the world. As the seconds passed me by, I began to worry—had I come all this way to overlook it at the last? If I was not ready to see the miracle, would it remain invisible forever? I feared I wasn’t worthy, hadn’t learned the lessons that I’d needed to to witness revelation.

And then I saw it: perched on the wet rock with its sharp nose in the air, black as the dead of night with flecks of deep red, yellow, and bright orange. Its dark eye were illegible; its reflection rippled in the water, dancing. It was a beatitude; little marvel on the thin line between rock and water, life and afterlife. My feet didn’t hurt anymore at all.

I sat there on a mossy rock for a few minutes, taking photos of the little frog and talking with César and Oscar while the singing water flowed around us. When they walked off to survey farther up the river, I put my camera away and whispered to the little frog about Amelia, my daughter, who I promised to bring back one day. Then I stood and turned and looked over my left shoulder at the little frog, luck-frog, survivor; he was just where we had left him, long fingers touching the cool water, still as stone.

Before long, Oscar had found another frog, and then another. Seeing only one would have made the journey worth it all for me, but it was important to César’s work that he record as many sightings as he could, making notes on each location, coloration, and behavior. Soon we had counted eight, and then eleven, twenty-two. Some sat on mossy rocks at the river’s edge in the spray of water from the little cataratas, and others perched as high as fifteen feet above the ground on the steep cliffs. We saw males and females, some of them a few inches long and others so small they could fit on the face of a coin. César said that these were juveniles: “a new generation,” life returning to a wounded land.

On three frogs, we found evidence of the chytrid fungus: cloudy patches like drops of white milk on their marbled skin. Doomed? Not doomed? It’s hard to say, but César reasoned that such a healthy population would not exist today if it had not developed a resistance to the pathogen. Those three little frogs bearing the cross of infection were not lethargic or sickly, which meant that maybe they were fighting a winning battle with the deadly fungus; with any luck, they would still be there in a few months when the first rains swept down across the mountains: a baptism.

We continued following the river upstream long after night had fallen and the moon had risen high above us in the pitch-black sky, and it felt like walking through a dream. We found more frogs sleeping on the heliconia leaves above the water, and I was beginning to lose count now. It was growing cold and I was growing lonely; I missed my daughter; I was ready to be home. But a mountain range still lay between us, and I would not return to her tonight. I wondered if she would wake up looking for me, and find me missing in the dark, and wonder if I had vanished like we know things can, here one moment and then gone, never to be found again. Then the night felt full of phantoms, surrounded as we were by spirits.

By the time we stumbled back into the camp-site, where Oscar’s wife had left warm tea waiting, we had counted fifty-four variable harlequin frogs. It was more than I had ever hoped I’d see in my long life, a greater bounty than I’d ever dreamed of—the sun shining on a dark planet. I kicked my boots off and stripped off my wet socks, and then fell asleep with my clothes on, writing down no notes about the expedition, recording nothing. I dreamed of dancing harlequins, conquerors of death.

In the morning, we said goodbye to Oscar and his little family, thanking them for all they’d offered us, and César and I drove back toward Perez Zeledón.

“Pretty impressive,” César murmured as he watched the mountain grow smaller in the distance. “But small. It’s a small world. It appears to be a healthy population, but it only appears that way. There’s no connection.” He was worrying about the pineapple plantations and pastures and smoldering fires that surrounded the green mountain on all sides; it was an island of existence encircled by perdition. That secluded population of Atelopus varius was doing well—even developing resistance to the chytrid fungus—but without connection to other populations, there would be no genetic diversity, no resilience, no hope. They would have to have faith that others like them might re-emerge to stitch their patchwork of existence back together—and hope that, when they did, there was still some forest left for them.

I left César at the end of the long dirt track leading up the steep hill to his house, thanked him for telling me his stories, and then backed my little car up the road again and turned north, toward the Pan-American highway leading up and over the mountain of death, where mist descended from the distant heavens to come and touch the earth.

The next morning, I went with my wife and daughter to the Basilica de los Ángeles in the center of Cartago. The previous winter, a few days after she found out that she was pregnant for the second time, my wife had gone with her sister to the same church to ask the saint that dwelled there for a miracle. She held her hands beneath the holy water and asked the little saint to send our child all the luck and love that she could spare; the memory of our miscarriage haunted her, even in the warm sun of the city, even in a world where lost frogs sometimes come back. The morning after I descended from the misty mountains, we went to the Basilica again, and we found the place that the holy water collects in pools, and we let it fall onto our daughter’s head like rain: a baptism. She is my variable harlequin frog, luck-frog, little saint, resilient and hopeful and alive, alive, alive!