Ghost stories from Children Who See Spirits

The Grateful Tenant

I’m writing this because I’ve found a lot of comfort in reading other people’s stories here, so I thought I’d share mine. We’ve been in this rental house for about...

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The Fig Tree Vigil

The cottage we rented on the Greek island of Serifos was a chalk-white box with blue shutters, clinging to a hillside above the Aegean. The village, Paleochora, was a maze...

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The Hollow Hour

The last thing I remember about my tenth summer was the way the cornfields hummed. Not with insects, but with a low, electric thrum that made my teeth ache. We...

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The Juniper Gate

The summer I turned nine, my father’s failing hardware business forced us to uproot from the flat plains of Kansas to the humid, pine-choked hills of northern Alabama. The moving...

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The Hollow Oak

My earliest memory is of the moving truck pulling away from a house that seemed to swallow the sunlight. I was four, maybe five, and the place we’d come to...

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The Wardrobe of Windermere

My first memories are not of sunlight or lullabies, but of shadows pooling in the corners of a room that smelled of old wood and dust. I was four, maybe...

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The Amber Pendant

It was a humid July evening when my friends and I decided to visit the newly consecrated shrine of the goddess Kali in the outskirts of our city. The shrine,...

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The Tally of Lost Days

The house on Bracken Lane was supposed to be our final stop, the one place where we could finally breathe. After years of drifting from one rented dwelling to another—each...

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The Frame Watcher

I first noticed it when I was seven, standing in the bathroom of our old house on Birch Lane. It was a smudge in the mirror, a darkness behind my...

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The Hollow Tap

The summer I turned eight, my parents packed me off to my Aunt Marlene’s farmhouse while they took a belated honeymoon to the coast. The farmhouse sat at the end...

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The Basement of the Beehive House

In the summer of 1987, when I was six, my father drove my older brother and me to the high desert to visit our great-aunt Maribel. Her home was a...

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The Hollow Hour

Every evening at six, when the tropical dusk swallowed the last of the day’s heat, the village of San Lorenzo would hold its breath. The generator sputtered and died, plunging...

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The Painted Fan

Mara was four, with a serious face and a habit of stating facts that made her mother’s skin prickle. She had long, dark hair that fell like a curtain over...

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The Map That Breathes

In the dusty attic of their new house in the Arizona desert, the Holloway family found a rolled-up canvas map. It was hand-drawn, depicting a town that didn’t exist on...

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The Fourth Place Setting

I was barely three, still small enough to fill the narrow crib my parents had squeezed into the corner of my room. I remember the ceiling fan turning lazily, the...

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The Hungry Hollow

Eloise had just turned three, and we lived in a crooked little house at the edge of the Hungry Hollow, a deep, tangled forest that seemed to swallow light. I’d...

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The Knocker in the Wall

The old farmhouse on Hemlock Road had been a fixer-upper, but for Lena and her husband, it was a dream. They’d moved in with their three-year-old, Maya, just as the...

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The Lock That Hums

The house on Birchwood Lane had always been a bit of a fixer-upper, and Mark Ellison was proud of the work he’d put into it. The basement, however, was a...

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The Crochet Shroud

The old farmhouse on Hemlock Lane had always been the subject of hushed conversations among the townsfolk, but we’d moved in with a sense of adventure, ignoring the whispers. After...

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The Thirst That Crawled

I was four when I learned that thirst could be a living thing. We lived on the fifth floor of the Meridian Towers, a block of concrete and rust that...

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The Rotting Frame

The house on Maple Street had a way of holding its breath. Maura noticed it the first time she stepped through the front door, a stillness that felt less like...

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The Welder’s Grid

I’ve spent thirty years in machine shops, torching, lathing, and coding precision parts. Ghosts are just misplaced air currents and faulty wiring. That’s what I told myself when my daughter,...

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The Cartographer of Still Air

My first memory of the farmhouse is the smell of rust and dried hay, a scent that clung to the walls like a second skin. We moved from the coast...

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The Pale Visitor from the Pines

My mother and I sat on the floor of her attic, surrounded by cardboard boxes that smelled of dust and mothballs. She handed me a worn crayon drawing, the paper...

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