Ghost stories from Apparitions

The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

In the sweltering summer of 1997, when I was nine, my father and I left our cramped apartment in the city for a weekend of fishing at a secluded lake...

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The Brown-Eyed Groomer

My friend Maya has always been a bit strange, claiming she could see things others couldn’t. I never doubted her, not after the night she woke up screaming in my...

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The Cobalt Hum

I don’t live at the base of Mount Thorne anymore, but the memory of that house clings to me like a cold sweat. It was a prefab modular home, fresh...

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The Salt Line

Mara had always believed in the geometry of protection. Before her daughter Lily was born, she would trace the sign of the cross over the crib with her thumb, a...

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The Knocking Code

I’m fifteen, and for the past two years, my bedroom has been a stage for something I can’t explain. We live in a drafty old farmhouse on the outskirts of...

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The Lantern Man of Moss Road

In the summer of 1978, my grandfather, Arthur, was a lean, restless seventeen-year-old who spent his weekends at The Crown, a pub on the edge of the small town of...

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The Porcelain Passenger

The first time I met the Gentleman, I was six years old, and I had just died for the first time. We lived in a rusty trailer at the edge...

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The Red Umbrella

The rain was coming down in sheets, drumming a frantic rhythm on the tin roofs of the shanties that lined the narrow alley. It was the last night of the...

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The Constant Visitor

I was six when I first saw him, standing at the foot of my bed in the old farmhouse my parents rented on the outskirts of Verona, Wisconsin. The moonlight...

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The Migraine Man

Elaine had always been a vivid dreamer. Most nights, her dreams were fleeting, evaporating like mist upon waking. But occasionally, one would cling to her memory with unsettling clarity, every...

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The Empty Hearth

The old farmhouse on Cedar Ridge had been in Callum’s family for generations. His great-grandfather had built it with his own hands, and every room seemed to hold the memory...

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The Sunken Grove

The summer I turned ten, we moved to a house on the edge of a reservoir that had been carved out of the old forest. It was a dry year,...

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The Frost on the Ridge

I was perched on the edge of the old farmhouse roof, the tin cold under my thighs, when Mia started her usual litany of complaints. Below us, the valley glowed...

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The Weight of the Covers

The cabin had been in the family for generations, but I had never visited it alone until that summer. My grandmother’s will had left it to me, along with a...

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The Lantern Keeper

Mara had just finished clearing the last of the cake crumbs from the kitchen counter when she heard the soft cooing from the nursery. It was a sound she had...

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The Tenant in the Root Cellar

It all began when I was eleven, the year my mother died of a wasting sickness that shrank her to a whisper of herself. My father had let her burial...

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The Blue Shirt in the Glass

I’ve always prided myself on being a rational man. Ghosts, spirits, apparitions—these were the fodder of campfire tales and B-movies, not the fabric of my daily life. So when I...

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The Scent of Rain on Concrete

I’ve learned to accept that my life runs on a different frequency than most people’s. Growing up, I had an imaginary friend, a tall figure with a kind face who...

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The Bone Lanterns

The summer I turned sixteen, my mother and I drove nine hours to the remote town of Morrow’s Hollow, where my grandmother, whom I called Nana June, lived in a...

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The Sunlit Strider

It began on a Tuesday, the kind of day when the heat shimmered off the gravel road and the cicadas sang so loud you could feel it in your teeth....

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The Debt Collector’s Ledger

At seventeen, I was a storm of bad decisions, and the worst of them was my boyfriend, Dale. His parents’ gravel driveway was the stage for my downfall, a place...

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The Pattern in the Static

My grandmother’s old transistor radio sat on the windowsill of my childhood bedroom, its cracked amber dial glowing softly even when unplugged. I was six the first time I heard...

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The Visitor at the Foot of the Bed

Four years ago, when I was living in a cramped apartment in Fayetteville, North Carolina, my husband had just returned from a six-month deployment in Afghanistan. The reunion was bliss,...

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The Last Shutter

The house on Linden Avenue had been a bargain, and I’d learned why within a month of moving in. It wasn’t the creaking floors or the drafty windows; it was...

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