Ghost stories from Apparitions

The Lantern Keeper

I am a first-generation American, raised on the vivid, hair-raising tales my grandmother spun from the old country. But I never thought I’d have a story of my own until...

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The Static Gaze

I hadn’t posted in months, not since the last incident. I’d convinced myself it was a fluke, a trick of the light, a stress-induced hallucination. My therapist said ‘acute anxiety,...

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The Cushion’s Cold Side

The Saturday morning sun streamed through the kitchen windows, catching the dust motes floating over our bowls of oatmeal. My mother, Elena, was telling me about her garden when the...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

My aunt Marta was the only one of my mother’s seven siblings who paid attention to the old woman’s tales. When I was a boy, I’d sit on the cracked...

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The Lamplighter’s Bargain

The old Hillman house had always been a fixture in our small town, a sprawling Victorian that had seen better days before we moved in. It sat at the end...

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The Tenant in the Walls

In the spring of 2019, my girlfriend Mira and I moved into a converted warehouse in the industrial district of our city. The building had been recently renovated, but it...

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The Flicker Between Films

I moved into the Beacon Theatre Apartments in October, a year after the dry cleaner on the ground floor shuttered and the space became a repair shop for vintage electronics....

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The Cold Room on Maple Street

We moved into the old Victorian on Maple Street in the fall of 2007, full of hope and boxes. The neighborhood was charming, with tree-lined sidewalks and neighbors who waved...

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The Hollow Signal

I never told anyone about the knocking at first. Not even Lena, and I told her almost everything. It started three years ago, right after we moved into that old...

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The Loom of Ember Hollow

The house at the edge of Ember Hollow had a name for us. We called it The Weeping Manse, not for any sorrow we could see, but for the way...

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The Hollow Man on Carter’s Lane

Mara first noticed the change in Elias last autumn, when the days grew short and the fog began to creep in from the river. They had moved to the old...

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The Janitor’s Last Round

Eddie Mears had been the night janitor at Millbrook High for six years, ever since he’d graduated from the same halls. The school was a squat, concrete maze of classrooms...

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The Lantern of the Hollow

The first time I saw the lantern, I thought it was just a trick of the light, a leftover glimmer from the setting sun caught in the wild tangle of...

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The Mirror Room at Bredsted

The summer I turned seventeen, my parents decided we needed a ‘digital detox’ in the Danish countryside. They’d found a listing for a restored farmhouse near the town of Bredsted,...

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The Creaking Step

The house on Maple Street had always felt like a sanctuary to Lena. It was a modest two-story with a creaky staircase that she’d chalked up to old age, but...

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The Chair on the Landing

The house on Maple Street had always felt alive to Elara, but not in a comforting way. It was a presence, a constant hum beneath the floorboards, a creak in...

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The Hollow Lantern

In the autumn of 2011, I took a job as a night nurse at St. Jude’s Hospice, a crumbling Victorian manor on the edge of the marshlands in Norfolk. The...

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The Hollow Man of Cinder Hills

I knew the moment we turned onto the gravel road that I’d made a mistake coming back. The house sat at the end of a long, unkempt drive, its windows...

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The Hollow Squeal

The Thackeray farm sprawled across the fog-choked flats of the Yakima Valley, a place where the wind never quite stopped moaning through the barbed wire. My uncle Delbert had always...

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The Hum Behind the Static

I live alone in a converted lighthouse on the Oregon coast, a relic from the 1920s that the rental agency had practically begged me to take. The spiral staircase groans...

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The Stain That Breathes

My name is Diego, and I’m sixteen, living in a cramped apartment on the third floor of a four-story walk-up in the old colonial zone of Santo Domingo. The building...

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The Last Streetlight

In the autumn of 2004, I moved into a small rented cottage on the edge of a sprawling, unkempt field, about fifty yards from a lonely stretch of country road....

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The Lantern Code

I’ve always been a rational person, a retired engineer who trusts in mechanics and physics. But what happened in the autumn of 2019 in our newly acquired cottage in the...

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