Ghost stories from Apparitions

The Wallpaper Bloom

In the spring of 2011, I moved into my grandmother’s old house in a town that time forgot. The house was a cramped Victorian with peeling floral wallpaper and a...

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The Cradle of Ice

My name is Elara. I’m not sure if what happened in our home was a ghost, a spirit, or something else entirely—maybe a crack in the fabric of things, a...

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The Last Tarantella

The summer solstice was a week gone, and the heat had settled into the Arkansas backwoods like a sickness. I was hauling a load of antique furniture from a dead...

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The Blue House on Carcass Road

The house was blue, the kind of blue that doesn’t belong in nature, a shade that seemed to have been scraped from a child’s crayon and smeared across the walls....

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The Weeping Wall

I never spoke about the thinness in our house, the way certain corners seemed to breathe. It wasn’t a gift; it was a curse, a constant low hum of awareness...

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The Catechism of Salt and Ash

It began with a smell—not the usual must of my grandmother’s house, but something deeper, like wet earth and burnt sugar. I had been staying there for a week, helping...

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The Blueprint in the Attic

It started two weeks after we unpacked our boxes in the refurbished paper mill, a sprawling complex that had been converted into a tech incubator. Our startup, a small team...

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The Hollow Watch

When Lena and I first saw the converted munitions depot, the rent was suspiciously low. The realtor, a woman with a nervous tic, kept mentioning the history of the building:...

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The Mirror’s Yield

My cousin Delia and I were six, the summer our mothers worked the late shift at the cannery. We stayed with our great-aunt Morgana in her crumbling farmhouse outside of...

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The Crossing Room

The moment I stepped through the front door of the farmhouse, I knew something was wrong. It wasn’t the peeling paint or the way the floorboards groaned under my boots,...

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The Key in the Freezer

I was nineteen, working the closing shift at a 24-hour diner off the interstate, a place that smelled of old grease and burnt coffee. My shift lead was a wiry,...

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The Hollow Night Concierge

At seventeen, Marcus had worked the night shift at the Melvin & Co. distribution hub for six months. It was a monotonous job, packing boxes of industrial lubricants and listening...

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The Name Whispering Ghost

My story takes place in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, about 60 or 70 miles from Chattanooga. The summer of 2008 was a really hard one for me, my boyfriend...

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The Curtain at Noon

It had been eleven years since I’d moved into the top-floor unit of the Meridian Residences, a sprawling complex that promised modern comfort and, more importantly, a fresh start. The...

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The Porcelain of the Unfinished Room

For most of my life, I’ve kept a mental scrapbook of things that don’t fit the world’s tidy explanations. There are maybe a dozen pages in that book, but one...

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The Hollow Light of Hallway Nine

I was eight when we moved into the flat on Hallway Nine, a narrow corridor in a block that smelled of boiled cabbage and damp plaster. My mother called it...

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The Last Light in Aisle Nine

My fourth semester of graduate school at Aldergate University had eaten away at my sense of time. I was in the library’s basement, the ‘crypt’ as we called it, because...

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The Harvest of Hollow Creek

The first time I noticed it was the summer I turned twelve. My family had just moved to Hollow Creek, a town that seemed to exist in a perpetual state...

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The Humming Void

Marta lived in a creaking old farmhouse in rural Kansas, miles from the nearest neighbor. The house had been in her family for generations, and she’d moved back after her...

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The Unseen Weight of Oak Hollow

The cellar of Oak Hollow House was less a basement and more a stone-lined crypt, its two chambers divided by a sagging wooden door that never quite closed. The air...

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The Pale Watcher of Hollow Creek

When we first laid eyes on Hollow Creek Manor, it was love at first sight. Nestled among ancient oaks and weeping willows, the dilapidated Victorian mansion exuded an eerie charm...

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The Dandelion Debt

My father collected antique newspapers, and one rainy afternoon he showed me a yellowed page from an 1843 edition of the Larkspur Ledger. The headline read: ‘The Ellery Farm Slayings.’...

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The Lamp That Flickered at 1:47

My old dog Buster had a habit that used to creep me out as a kid. Every night, when he padded from the kitchen to my parents’ bedroom, he would...

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The Mulberry Mark

My name is Elara, and I’ve always been a bit strange. My older sister, Mira, was the one who opened my eyes to the paranormal. At first, I was terrified...

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