Ghost stories from Apparitions

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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The Man in the Hall

It was late October when we moved into the old farmhouse on Hemlock Road. The previous owners had left in a hurry, and the place had a musty, forgotten smell...

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The Mudslide Man

In the autumn of 1998, when I was sixteen, my family took a trip to the remote village of San Cipriano in the highlands of Central America. My father had...

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The Glass Bead Pact

In the humid, labyrinthine corridors of the Oasis Residence, a condominium that hugged the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Maya found herself confined to the penthouse suite she shared with her...

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The Hollow Marker

The rain had stopped an hour ago, but the asphalt still gleamed under the pale moon like a ribbon of wet coal. Lola Remedios drove slowly, her knuckles white on...

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The Weeping Mannequin

In the sweltering summer of 2006, I had just graduated from high school and moved into a sprawling, forgotten department store on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico. My cousin,...

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The Lantern Man of Oakhaven

The last of the festival fires had been stamped out an hour ago, and the streets of Oakhaven had returned to their sleepy, small-town silence. I was walking home from...

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The Cloth Merchant’s Bargain

I first met Mr. Alistair on a Tuesday, during the annual autumn market in the village of Thornwick. He was a tall, gaunt man with a thin mustache and a...

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The Hollow Passenger

The road unfurled like a black tongue through the pine barrens, and Elena’s Civic ate the miles with a hungry hum. Beside her, Marcus rode shotgun, his thumb tracing the...

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The Rodeo’s Debt

At thirteen, I thought I understood fear. I’d watched my older brother leap from the barn loft into a pile of hay, his ankle twisting with a sickening snap. I’d...

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The Mirror’s Moth

Every morning at 5:45, Elara Perez knelt by her bed and whispered the same prayer her mother had taught her as a child. The words were worn smooth, like stones...

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The Bellhop at the Gilded Finch

Two winters ago, I was working the night shift at the Gilded Finch, a decaying hotel perched above the salt marshes, where the fog rolls in thick enough to swallow...

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The Train in the Field

In the summer of 1998, I was twelve and sent to stay with my Aunt Mara in the remote town of Culver’s Bend, nestled among the cornfields of Nebraska. Aunt...

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The Night the Music Stopped

My cousin Elena told me this story two summers ago, when she came back from her trip to her grandmother’s village in the Spanish countryside. She had gone there to...

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The Spook

It was the summer holidays and I was seven. Me my sister and Mum and Dad were going to Ecuador to my granddad and grandma’s holiday home. We went their...

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The Gilded Finch

June 3rd, 2023, was a strange day for me. I was walking to the antique shop where I worked, and as I crossed the intersection of Birch and Willow, a...

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The Jogger in the Hall

In the autumn of 2008, I was eight months pregnant with my first child, a girl we planned to name Amelia. We lived in a sprawling Victorian house my husband...

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The Night the Lamp Flickered

June 2012. A small, isolated research station in the Alaskan tundra, thirty miles from the nearest town. I’m a glaciologist, not a paranormal investigator, and I’ve always prided myself on...

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The Lantern in the Library

The summer before my junior year, my cousin Maya turned seventeen, and my aunt threw her a lavish birthday weekend at our family’s lakeside cabin. The last night, after the...

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The Light in the Silo

It has been forty years since that autumn evening in the fall of 1983, yet I can still recall every detail with the stark clarity of a photograph developing in...

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The Pale Woman by the Cot

My great-aunt Marta was the one who told me this, years after the family had buried the memory of it. She was a practical woman, a farmer’s wife, not given...

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The Cinderwood Thicket

I’m Nina, 22, born and raised in the outskirts of a small Dutch town called Den Burgh, famous for its windmills and cheese. My parents are from Indonesia, so I...

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