Ghost stories from Children Who See Spirits

The Crying Wainscot

The morning light filtered through the linen curtains, casting soft squares on the nursery floor. Lena sat cross-legged on the rug, stacking wooden blocks with her daughter, Mira, whose two-year-old...

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The Barrens of Red Creek

The summer of ’09 was a furnace, the kind that cracked the earth and turned the air to glass. Our house sat at the edge of Red Creek, a dried-up...

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The Frosted Window

In 2008, my nephew, Toby, was five years old when our great-aunt, whom he had never met, passed away. We lived in the small town of Ashford, nestled between a...

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The Room Across the Hall

My daughter, Lily, has been talking to someone in her room at night. I can hear her through the baby monitor, her soft, lisping voice murmuring in a language I...

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Pelt and Static

The house on Maple Hollow Lane had always breathed with a certain rhythm. I knew its sighs, its creaks, the way it settled at dusk like an old dog. I’d...

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The Ceiling Light Flickers

I never used to believe in ghosts. Not really. I figured kids have wild imaginations, and that whole ‘imaginary friend’ thing was just a phase. But then my niece, Lily,...

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The Ceiling Watcher

When my nephew Theo turned three, he started talking about the man on the ceiling. Not in a playful, imaginary way, but with a stillness that made the hairs on...

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The Last Lemonade

I was nine that summer, spending a week with my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Carl at their house on the edge of a town called Hollow Creek. Their daughter, my...

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The Mannequin in the Attic

The old Criterion Theatre, now converted into a high school, was a place of grand facades and hidden decay. Its auditorium, with its dusty velvet seats and sweeping balconies, still...

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The Carriage Driver’s Debt

The old farmhouse on Hemlock Road had always been a place of strange noises and shifting drafts, but I never thought much of it until the summer I turned nine....

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The Last Crayon

My earliest clear memory is of my third birthday, when I received a box of 64 crayons. I was so proud of that box, with its sharpener in the back,...

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The Attic Resident

My brother and I were nine and seven when we moved into the old house on Willow Creek Lane. The place had stood empty for years, and the realtor warned...

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The Crank of the Sewing Machine

When I was seven, my family moved into a dusty apartment above my grandmother’s old tailor shop. The place smelled of mothballs and ironed wool, and the floorboards creaked like...

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The Cinderblock Hum

The Cinderblock Hum chronicles the haunting of a family in the Sunvale Courts, a low-income housing complex on the outskirts of Pueblo, Colorado. Built in the late 1960s, the complex...

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The Coffin in the Cellar

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. Not until the summer of 2001, when I was nine years old, and my family moved into the old Wainwright house on the...

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The Hollow Visitor

My name is Ellen Marsh, and I’ve never been one for the unexplained. I worked as a paramedic for over a decade, saw death in its ugliest forms, and always...

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The Man in the Mirror’s Frame

Three-year-old Elara had always been a bright, cheerful child, her laughter like wind chimes in the old farmhouse we’d inherited from my grandmother. The house, with its creaking floors and...

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The Paper Procession

At five, I believed the world was soft and small, bounded by the gravel road and the pine woods that swallowed the horizon. We lived in a rented farmhouse on...

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The Cattail Bed

We’d moved three times in two years, each house a little further from the city, each one a little older, a little more tired. The first had been a modern...

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The Marble Visitor

The afternoon sun draped the old Hillcrest Cemetery in a honeyed glow, and the air smelled of cut grass and fading flowers. My sister, Cora, and I had brought her...

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The Linoleum Pattern

My grandmother used to tell me about the winter we spent in that drafty farmhouse outside of Grafton, Vermont. I was barely a year old, just learning to sit up...

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The Weeping Tile

The summer we moved into the old Kessler place, the air was thick with the smell of rain and rust. My mom, always practical, had found the rental through a...

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The Picture on the Wall

When my daughter was six, we lived in a small house near the woods. She would often tell us about a tall man who stood in the hallway, just watching....

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The Grinning Basin

The first time I noticed something off was the day we moved into the cul-de-sac at the edge of town. The houses were all alike, beige and boxy, with lawns...

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