Ghost stories from Apparitions

The Sixth Floor Visitor

Marta was eleven, the same age her sister Lucia had been when she died. Their new apartment was on the sixth floor of a crumbling block that smelled of damp...

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The Moon-Bleached Wall

I was six when we moved into the old mill house at the edge of the marsh, a sprawling two-story structure with clapboard siding that creaked in the wind. My...

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The Cartographer’s Pencil

I’m a mapmaker, not a medium, so when I started feeling things that weren’t there, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. It began after I moved into...

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The Salt Wind and the Hollow Door

My mother, Eleanor, had a mind like a steel trap, sharp and unyielding, especially when it came to things that went bump in the night. As a nurse, she’d seen...

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The Fourth Exposure

The first time I noticed the gap was when I picked up the prints from the pharmacy. I’d been sorting through my grandmother’s old things after she passed, and I’d...

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The Cartographer’s Footnote

I had been hunting for a slim volume of nautical charts from the 18th century, tucked somewhere in the vast map archive of the Meridian Historical Society. The place was...

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The Button Under the Pillow

I was nine, spending the summer at my grandmother’s farmhouse in the hills of Vermont, a place where the nearest neighbor was a mile down a dirt road and the...

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The Ledger of Unfinished Work

I have always been able to see the five. They are not ghosts, not in the traditional sense. They are more like water stains on the wallpaper of reality, visible...

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The Cinder Children

The night my mother left me, the town of Saltmarsh was already dead. Not dead in the way of empty streets and shuttered windows, but dead in the way of...

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The Man Who Swallowed the Lantern

When I was a child, I lived in a small, isolated village in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, where the nights were so dark you could feel them pressing...

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The Lantern of Needles

The summer I turned twenty-three, I returned to my grandmother’s village in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, to help care for her while my parents were away. It was 1987,...

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The Leaf-Fall Watcher

In the late summer of 2005, I was sitting on the old, weathered trampoline in my friend Maya’s backyard. Her cousin Rachel had come to stay for the week, and...

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The Grudge of Hollow Creek

Six months after I inherited my grandfather’s farm, the grain silo’s rusted door began to swing open and shut with a rhythmic, defiant clang. The nearest neighbor was a mile...

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The Man Who Fixed the Fence

I never liked the house on Cinder Lane. It wasn’t just the peeling paint or the porch that sagged like a tired spine; it was the way the air thickened...

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The Hollow Comfort

The first time I felt her, I thought the old farmhouse was just playing tricks on me. A draft from the cracked window, a shift in the floorboards. But the...

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The Perpetual Draft

In the late autumn of 1995, I was the night watchman at the Marigold Grand, a once-grand casino that had seen better decades. My rounds took me through the opulent...

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The Hollow Static

The first time I noticed the static, I was standing in the kitchen of our new apartment, three weeks after the movers had left. The radio in the living room,...

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The Tenant in the Walls

In the autumn of 2019, my husband and I bought a charming but aging Victorian house in the small town of Ashford, nestled among maple trees that turned fiery red...

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The Pale Figure in the Doorframe

The old house on Cedar Lane had always felt wrong, but for fifteen-year-old Maya, it was home. Her parents had bought it cheap after a foreclosure, and the musty smell...

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The Midnight Warden

I was seven when it first came to me, in the old farmhouse on the outskirts of Larkspur Hollow. The house creaked and groaned like an old man, and the...

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The Locked Ward

Corporal Elias Vance had spent four years in the British Army, most of it in dusty outposts where the only ghosts were the ones you made yourself. But home was...

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The Pencil Prankster

Last autumn, I was hunched over my drafting table in the attic studio of our creaky Victorian house, sketching the final shading on a tree for my architecture class. The...

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The Last Drop of Water

It was a Tuesday, and I was watching my six-year-old niece, Lily, while my sister Jenna ran to the city for a job interview. The list she left on the...

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The Drip in the Static

The Drip in the Static I moved to the outskirts of Reykjavik three months ago, into a converted fish-canning factory that now boasts ‘industrial-chic’ apartments. My girlfriend, Sigrid, loves the...

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