Ghost stories from Apparitions

The Mist That Never Lifted

In the winter of 2019, I was six months pregnant with my first child, a girl we planned to name Mei. My husband, Tom, worked the early shift at the...

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The Last Two Houses

When I first met Mira, I thought she was a bit unhinged. She insisted that a presence shared her bedroom in the old family house on Hemlock Lane. To prove...

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The Modem’s Wake-Up Call

The house on Maple Street had a personality, or so I told myself. It was the kind of old Victorian that creaked and sighed like a tired old man, and...

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The Pale Visitor

I was twelve, not thirteen, the summer we moved into my grandmother’s old farmhouse in the dusty town of Plevna, Kansas. The house had been in the family for generations,...

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The Keeper of the Static

In the autumn of 2008, I was a nineteen-year-old misfit living in my late grandmother’s house in the outskirts of a dying mill town. The house was a Victorian relic,...

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The Night the Intercom Crackled

I had been working the overnight shift at the Meridian Peak Sanatorium for just over three months. The place was a converted tuberculosis hospital from the 1920s, now a long-term...

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The Iron Stove’s Promise

In the town of Kettlebrook, where the oak trees leaned over the roads like curious old men, my brother Eli and I spent our evenings on dirt bikes. I rode...

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The Hum of the Broken Fan

The apartment on Meridian Avenue had always been a quiet haven for me. At twenty-six, I had grown accustomed to solitude, the kind that settles into your bones and makes...

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The Seamstress of the Velvet Room

When I took the job as costume manager at the Orpheum, a crumbling Victorian theater tucked behind a row of shuttered shops, I thought I knew what I was getting...

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The Man in the Raincoat

The first time I saw him, I thought he was just another neighbor I hadn’t met yet. It was a Tuesday, the end of October, and I was waiting for...

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The Lantern’s Constant Vigil

The year was 1972 when we moved into the apartment above the old packing shed. My husband’s new job managing the rose nursery came with a place to live, a...

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The Man at the End of the Hall

After my daughter Elsie was born, I started seeing a man in our new house. It was an old Victorian in the middle of a dense forest, far from the...

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The Pulsing Static

In the autumn of 2007, my son, Leo, was just a few months old. We lived in a small, creaky house in the countryside, surrounded by fields that turned to...

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The Lantern Man

I never understood why my grandmother insisted on keeping a kerosene lantern in the attic. She said it was for ’emergencies,’ but the house had working electricity, and the old...

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The Unpainted Floor

I was eleven when my lungs decided to betray me. The doctors called it a severe case of pneumonia, but to me, it was just a long, boring stretch of...

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The Hollow Between the Pines

The rattle began as a soft, rhythmic percussion against the windowpane, like a chorus of tiny, wooden mallets. I remember pausing, comic book frozen mid-air, convinced it was just the...

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The Laundry Line

My name is Elara, and I’ve just had the living daylights scared out of me. I’ve always been fascinated by the strange and unexplained, devouring every ghost story and paranormal...

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The Gravel Sifters

The summer air in Red Bluff, California, 1956, was thick with the smell of sunbaked dirt and wild sage. I was six, and the world was a vast, dusty playground...

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The Clockmaker’s Apprentice

It was late October in the town of Morrow’s Hollow, and the days had grown short and brittle, like the fallen leaves that skittered across the cracked pavement outside the...

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The Last Relay

The old Coast Guard station on Loon Point had been decommissioned for years, but my brother and I still spent summers there, helping our father restore the lighthouse. The station...

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The Candle’s Hollow

It was the autumn of 1995 when I first sensed something wrong with our little flat in Salalah. My colleague, Mara, and I had been transferred from Muscat to the...

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The Persistence of Sound

Maya was deep in the final chapter of her thesis, ‘The Myth of the Eternal Return in Northern Folklore,’ when her phone buzzed. It was her father, which was odd;...

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The Porcelain Guest

At six, I was an anxious child, prone to nightmares and fits of sleeplessness. So when my parents announced a weekend trip to my grandmother’s restored farmhouse in the dusty...

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The Long Strands of the Loft

I remember it like a splinter under the skin, a memory I can’t dig out. It was during my junior year at Ashworth University, in a cramped lecture hall that...

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