The Floating Face

February 24, 2025

by Andreanne

I was always curious about strange things. As a kid, I loved listening to ghost stories, whether from my parents or around a campfire. But I never thought I would see a ghost myself—until one unforgettable night.

I was eleven years old, living with my family in an old house in a quiet neighborhood. The houses were large and had been there for many years. I always felt like something unseen was watching, but I never had proof. That night changed everything.

After a normal evening of dinner and board games, my younger brother and I went to bed. We shared a room, and his bed was across from mine. The night was dark, with only a little moonlight coming through the window. We whispered to each other, not feeling sleepy yet.

Then, out of nowhere, something began to appear near the foot of my bed. A mist, floating about six feet in the air. I watched, frozen, as it slowly shaped itself into a man’s face. He had sharp eyes, a high forehead, and a long nose. His gaze was strong, almost as if he could see inside me.

I wasn’t scared at first—just curious. Then his mouth started moving. He was talking! But no sound came out. I could see his lips forming words, but I couldn’t hear them.

I needed to know if I was imagining it. So I asked my brother, “Do you see that?”

He turned his head, looked for a second—then screamed. That’s when fear hit me, and I screamed too.

Our father and older sister ran upstairs, switching on the light. The face vanished instantly.

Dad looked annoyed. “What’s going on?” he demanded.

We told him everything. He listened carefully, then left the room and came back with an old photo album I had never seen before. He flipped through the pages and told me, “See if anyone looks like the man you saw.”

I slowly turned the pages—then stopped. My heart skipped a beat.

“That’s him,” I said, pointing.

Dad’s face changed. “That’s my grandfather,” he said. “He passed away many years before you were born.”

That was my first real ghost experience. Many more followed, but I will never forget the night a spirit came to speak to me.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

The Hollow Hour

Our room was on the second floor of the old farmhouse, a long, narrow space with two single beds shoved against opposite walls. The window faced the barn, and at night, when the light was off, the moon would cast a pale square on the floorboards. I was eight, my brother Marcus was nine. We […]

The Cold Room of No. 12

I was four when we moved into the old carriage house on the edge of the marsh. The place was a relic from another century, its brick walls sweating with damp, its windows rattling like loose teeth. My parents, Lorna and Dale, thought it was charming. My older siblings—Elsie, twelve, and the twins, Marcus and […]

The Cradle of Static

It began not many months ago, at the edge of dawn, when the world outside my window was a smear of grey and the only sound was the hum of the refrigerator downstairs. I lived with my father, whose work hours dragged him from our small apartment at three in the morning until nearly noon, […]

The Marble in the Garden

In the quiet town of Ashwick, neighboring families shared a long fence line and a mutual love for sunflowers. I was eighteen, and the little girl next door, Elara, was the sun of that garden. At three, she had a laugh like wind chimes and a vocabulary that bloomed daily. I taught her words like […]

The Lantern of Hollow Creek

The call came at 6:47 AM, wrenching me from a groggy sleep on my cousin’s couch in Sacramento. I remember the disjointed fragments: my aunt’s voice, cracked and raw, saying that my cousin Marcus was gone, that he’d driven his pickup off the old Coldwater Bridge just before dawn. The rest of the family gathered […]

The Inventory of Unread Hours

In my final year at the Armitage Conservatory, I volunteered for the annual library purge—a tradition where students sorted through shelves of forgotten donations. My partner, Emmett, and I drew the short straw: the sub-basement annex, a windowless room where the air tasted of copper and old paper. The task began at dusk, after the […]

The Slate Between Doors

I moved to Playa del Carmen six months after my sister Rosa had settled there, trading the crowded streets of Houston for the humid, salt-tinged air of the Yucatan. My family has always had a peculiar sensitivity—we see things others can’t. In Houston, I’d seen a woman in a white dress at the foot of […]

The Lily on the Landing

The first time I saw her, I was six, standing in the hallway of my grandmother’s farmhouse in the hills of Appalachia, the bathroom door ajar behind me. The house had a smell of damp wood and dried herbs, and the hallway was lit by a single bulb that cast long, wavering shadows. She sat […]

The Porcelain Doll

When I was sixteen, my family lived in an old farmhouse at the end of a long gravel road. The house had been in my mother’s family for generations, and it was full of nooks and crannies that seemed to breathe with history. My bedroom was on the second floor, at the end of a […]

The Room That Swallowed Light

In the autumn of 2004, I moved to a small desert town called Pinyon Ridge, a place where the sun bleached the sky and the mountains stood like silent watchers. I knew no one. On my first day at Pinyon Ridge High, a girl named Rosa introduced herself, and we became inseparable. But that same […]

The Stairwell That Breathed

Mara never believed in ghosts. Not until the night she heard the stairwell breathe. She and her partner, Elias, had moved into the old Harlow house on the edge of the dying town of Crestwood, a sprawling Victorian that had been gutted and renovated into a family home. Their daughter, Lily, had been born three […]

The Loom of the Drowned Orchard

I grew up in the arid folds of Arizona, where the sun bleached the world to bone and the only ghosts were the heat shimmers that danced on the asphalt. As a child, I chalked up my uncanny perceptions to a too-vivid imagination. But now, at thirty-two, stationed at the rust-belt post of Fort Drum […]