Ghost stories from Animals

The Iron Gate

I was eleven when I found the crow. It was a scraggly thing, feathers matted with oil, one wing bent at a wrong angle. It had tumbled into the storm...

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The Chair in the Corner

I was twenty-three and living alone in a dusty ground-floor apartment, the kind with radiators that clanked and windows that rattled in the wind. My two kittens, Ghost and Wraith,...

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The Lantern in the Corn

It was late October, the kind of cold that creeps into your bones, when my husky, Koda, slipped his collar and bolted through the gap in the fence. I stood...

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The Watcher at the Treeline

I never believed in the old stories about the woods behind our cabin—the ones about the thin places where things slip through. But two days before New Year’s Eve, 2010,...

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The Salted Earth

I’ve always been a collector of small signs, the body’s quiet warnings that the universe is about to tip. It’s not prophecy, not some mystic gift—just a deep, physical certainty...

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The Peculiar Draft

We had just moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of Morrow County, a place that had been empty for decades, its bones creaking under the weight of neglect....

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The Indentation

Martha had always been a woman of simple comforts. The old farmhouse on Cedar Hollow Road was her sanctuary, a place where the creaks and groans of age felt like...

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The Ninth Visitor

My grandmother, Elena, was the keeper of the story. She told it to me on the night before her funeral, her voice a dry rustle like leaves skittering across asphalt....

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The Winter Burial

The winter of 2008 had been brutal, the kind that crept into the bones and stayed. Our house, a drafty Victorian on the edge of a dying town, seemed to...

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The Fabric of the Night

I never thought I’d be writing this, but I need to know if anyone else has felt it. My name is not important, but my story might be. I live...

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The Mourning Glass

The summer solstice had passed, and Lila had been counting the days until the heat would relent. She kept her collection of exotic invertebrates in a converted cellar beneath her...

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The Concrete Antechamber

In the autumn of 2011, my father drove me to the municipal animal shelter on the outskirts of a town called Millbrook, a place I’d once volunteered at for a...

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Baby Girl Gone Too Soon – Ciara

It is with a heavy heart that I type this today. The last month was traumatic for us as a family, we had to lay our beautiful fur baby Ciara...

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Did I See A Cat Crying?

This is a sad story, so get some tissue while reading. It took me awhile to have permission from Aya’s uncle, to put this story up. So, here we go....

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The Missing Piece

Milo was a sleek grey tabby with eyes the color of sea glass, a stark contrast to my previous companion, Jasper, who had been a languid, unbothered soul. Milo was...

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Henrique, We Miss You

“Notícias tristes” (sad news) My sister in Brazil texted me. I was wondering what happened; did she break up again with her boy friend? Did anything happened to our father?...

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Return Of The Dead

I have no idea if it’s his spirit or ghost, but every night, 2:15 am exactly, I wake up to my long dead dog, Charlie, standing in the doorway of...

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The Grey Doppelganger

The night began like any other, with the soft hum of the refrigerator and the occasional creak of the old house settling. I was jolted from a dreamless sleep by...

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The Molt Collector

In the arid outskirts of Marrakesh, where the wind carries whispers of ancient dunes, I ran a modest business breeding tarantulas. My specialty: the ornate baboon spiders of the Atlas...

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The Comfort of Static

Elara and her husband, Dominic, moved into their home in the rural outskirts of a small town, where the fields stretched like gray quilts under a perpetual overcast sky. They...

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The Hollow Hum

We moved into the old farmhouse in early spring, when the mud on the lane was still soft and the fields around us were bare. I was six, and my...

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The Wound in the Yard

I was sixteen, not seventeen, when we moved into the house on Elderberry Lane, and I’ve long since stopped trying to correct the timeline. The year was 1981, give or...

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The Cinderlings

The Cinderlings arrived in a cardboard box, not a shelter. My daughter Elara found them behind the bakery, a litter of three kittens nestled in a pile of ash and...

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The Lantern Field

The summer I turned twelve, my parents sent me to my grandfather’s farm in the high desert of New Mexico, a place called La Cienaga. It was a vast, empty...

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