Ghost stories from Animals

The Last Ember of Autumn

On the first cold evening of October, I buried Mira under the old oak tree at the edge of Willow Creek. She was a border collie with a patch over...

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The Lantern Trap

The preserve was a scar on the map, a patch of old forest the county had deemed too rocky to build on. My friend Derek and I used to slip...

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The Alder Creek Landing

In 1974, I was thirteen, and my family had just moved into a sprawling, drafty Victorian house on the edge of Alder Creek, a town so small it barely registered...

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The Stoneman’s Posture

It was the first Tuesday of September, the kind of evening when the heat clung to the bricks like a second skin. My rented cottage sat at the edge of...

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The Cinder Mare

In the fading autumn of my twelfth year, my family moved to the dust-choked town of Morrow’s Rest, a place that seemed to have been forgotten by time and mapmakers...

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The Porcelain Finch

In the autumn of that year, the old farmhouse on Larkspur Lane seemed to breathe with a life of its own. I had come to stay with my friend Mira,...

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The Last Bowl of Cream

I never meant to be a cat person. In fact, I had sworn off pets entirely after my divorce, when I moved into a cramped basement studio with just a...

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The Oatmeal Coil

The morning my grandmother died, I found a skein of yarn in her knitting basket that I had never seen before. It was the color of dried blood, and it...

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The Stairwell Visitor

My earliest memory is of the stairwell. Not the stairs themselves, but the space between the steps and the ceiling, a triangle of dimness that smelled of old wood and...

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The Lantern in the Hollow

I was nine when we moved from the sun-scorched streets of Georgia to the damp, wood-choked hills of West Virginia. The house we rented sat at the end of a...

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The Cedar Grove Hound

When I was ten, I stayed over at my cousin’s farmhouse, a sprawling, drafty place that had been in our family for generations. My cousin, Mara, had recently lost her...

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The Clockwork Hare

The old house in Portland, Maine, creaked like a ship at sea, and I, Elara, had grown used to its moans. But the sound that pulled me from sleep each...

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The Ghost of Lazarus Lane

On the first Tuesday after the harvest moon, I lost my dog, Buster, a golden retriever who had been my shadow for nine years. My partner, Lena, found him stiff...

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The Pelt of the Garden

In the autumn of that year, I moved into a rented cottage on the edge of the moor, where the heather turned the land to rust and the wind carried...

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The Lantern at Hollow Creek

When I was seven, my family moved to a rambling house on the edge of Hollow Creek, a place where the water ran black and the trees leaned in as...

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The Keeper of the Garden

The first sign that something had gone terribly wrong was the soil in the back garden. It began to shift, as if something beneath the surface was breathing. I noticed...

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The Cold Room on Maple Street

In the summer I turned fourteen, I was dating a girl named Elena. She had shown me where she lived, a modest two-story house on Maple Street, and she was...

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The Lantern in the Gully

The town of Ashburn, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, was built on land that had been wild for centuries. Before the first settlers, it was a dense...

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The Pavement-Marked Line

It was just past three in the morning when Mara finally left the all-night diner. She always walked the five blocks home, a habit she’d formed in college and never...

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The Tail in the Corridor

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. I was the type who would explain away every creak and flicker as the house settling or a draft. But then we lost...

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The Patchwork Sentinel

In the autumn of 2018, my family and I moved into a rambling Victorian house on Cedar Lane, our first home. Across the street stood a neglected craftsman bungalow, its...

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Phantom Pets

I can’t remember exactly how old I was, but I was roughly around 11-13 years old. We’d always had pets growing up from mice to hamsters, chickens and later on...

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The Weight of the Night

I never thought I’d have to say goodbye to them both in the same week. My two German Shepherds, Max and Ruby, had been my entire world for nearly a...

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The Hollow Ticker

When the Peralta family moved into the old farmhouse on Cedar Ridge, they knew it needed work. The paint peeled like sunburned skin, the porch sagged, and the wind had...

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