Ghost stories from Apparitions

The Static Between Frequencies

I’m sitting in my sister’s new house, a glass box of a place she had built on the edge of a reclaimed marsh. The architect called it ‘minimalist modern,’ but...

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The Crooked Music Box

My name is Elena, and I am twenty-two. I’ve been seeing things since I was a child—shadows that don’t belong, whispers that only I hear—but nothing prepared me for the...

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The Gate of Sweet Nettles

In the summer of 1987, when I was nine, my twin brother Leo and I were playing in the long gravel driveway behind our house in the hills of Vermont....

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The Crouching Figure

In the autumn of 2019, I rented a dilapidated farmhouse on the outskirts of a small town in the Midwest. The previous tenant had left abruptly, and the landlord was...

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The Lantern in the Rain

When I was nine, my cousins and I used to cut through the marsh behind my grandmother’s farm to reach the old oak grove. We knew every hummock and ditch,...

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The Grain in the Glass

When I was thirteen, my family moved to a rented farmhouse on the edge of a town called Millbrook. The house was old, with a wrap-around porch and a barn...

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The Visitor by the Window

The night of June 3rd, 2016, I turned in early, exhausted from a long day of cataloging antique books at the local library. My old cat, Jasper, curled up at...

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The Fisherman’s Vigil

The moon hung low and heavy, a jaundiced coin against the bruised sky, as I drove home from the Merriweather’s annual gathering. It was a party that had sprawled past...

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The Third Floor Landing

The house on Hemlock Road had a peculiar rhythm. It breathed through its floorboards, sighed through its radiators, and occasionally, it walked. I knew those footsteps well—the heavy thud of...

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The Wallpaper Man

The house on Ashworth Lane was a mistake from the start. I knew it the moment we pulled up in the moving truck, the engine sighing like a tired beast....

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The Foot of the Bed

I never believed in ghosts, not really. Not until the summer of 2004, when I was twenty-six and staying at my Aunt Ruth’s farmhouse in the rolling hills of eastern...

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The Hour of the Hollow

The old farmhouse on the edge of the marsh had always been a place of quiet unease, but it wasn’t until the third week of November that the pattern emerged....

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The Knuckle Tap

The old farmhouse on Hemlock Road had always creaked and groaned, but this was different. It was a sound like a finger tapping on dry wood, coming from the attic...

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The Lantern’s Last Gasp

The night was stifling, heavy with the scent of pine and damp earth, when Margaret first heard the scratching. It came from the direction of the old greenhouse, a sound...

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The Third-Floor Light

My brother Theo and I had an eleven-year gap. When I was fourteen and he was only three, he was just learning to master the rickety wooden staircase of our...

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The Lantern Moth

Nina had always prided herself on being a rational person. She was a biologist, after all, someone who dealt in observable phenomena, not ghost stories or superstitions. But over the...

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The Static Between Frequencies

At thirteen, I was convinced that the world was made of solid things, that if you couldn’t see it or touch it, it wasn’t there. That was before the autumn...

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The Sixth Bed

In the summer of 2013, Carl returned to his grandmother’s sprawling estate in the rural outskirts of Cusco, Peru, after a decade abroad. The old hacienda, with its thick adobe...

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The Lantern Keeper

The house at 13 Cinder Lane had always been a quiet one. Nestled at the end of a cul-de-sac, it was the kind of place where nothing ever happened, where...

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The Gravel and the Growl

In the sweltering summer of 2009, I sat on the sagging porch of my rented farmhouse, a sweating glass of iced tea in one hand and my orange tabby, Marmalade,...

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The Salt-Rimmed Window

The clock on the mantel read 11:47, but the night felt older. Rain lashed against the windows of our rented farmhouse, and the wind moaned through the loose frame of...

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The Layers Beneath

The cardboard box was the color of a stale biscuit, its tape peeling like old skin. As I dragged it into the narrow hallway of our new flat, I didn’t...

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The Hollow Door

The old farmhouse had a way of holding its breath. Every floorboard groaned with secrets, and the walls seemed to press in like they were listening. My room, at the...

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The Apron of Lavender

It was a Tuesday night in late October, and the rain had been tapping against the window pane of my attic apartment for hours. I’d fallen asleep at my desk,...

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