Ghost stories from Children Who See Spirits

The Man Moved With Us

In 2002, my husband committed suicide. Our son was 8 months old. We moved back to California to start our lives over again. I had to live with my parents,...

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The Room Below the Stairs

We moved into the old farmhouse when I was seven, and the place felt wrong from the first night. The floorboards creaked in patterns that didn’t match our footsteps, and...

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The Wallpaper Bloom

I have always heard that babies see things different from adults. And the reason I think people believe this is because at an early age, babies don’t know how to...

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The Grackle’s Stare

I’ve never been one to believe in the supernatural. Ghosts, spirits, that sort of thing—I always chalked it up to overactive imaginations. But then we moved into the old farmhouse...

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The Room That Hated Fennel

My name is Mira, and I live with my three-year-old daughter, Elsie, in a modest house on Cedar Lane, a street of identical mid-century homes built for factory workers after...

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The Shelf of Small Things

Carl and Marge had been in the old farmhouse for five years now, fixing it up piece by piece. It was a sprawling place with a wrap-around porch and a...

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The Lanternkeeper’s Portrait

My daughter Mira and I have always had a fascination with the strange and unexplained. For the past year, we’ve devoured every paranormal documentary and ghost-hunting series on television. It...

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The Empty Cradle

My daughter, Lily, has always been ahead of the curve. She spoke her first word, ‘mama,’ at four months, and soon after, ‘hi!’ became her cheerful greeting for anything and...

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The Loom and the Snooze Button

In 1989, my wife Elena and I moved our family into a clapboard duplex on the edge of the salt marshes, a place where the sea fog rolled in like...

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The Hollow Lot

In 2016, the city of Angeles was a furnace of fear. The anti-drug campaign had turned neighbors into informants and quiet streets into war zones. My father, Ernesto, had a...

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The Lantern of Larkspur Hollow

My ancestry is a patchwork stitched from threads I never fully understood—Finnish, Basque, a dash of Cornish, and a whisper of the old country that no one could name. But...

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The Lady in the Lavender Dress

I was four when my sister was born, and my parents brought her home from the hospital. My great-aunt Hilda, a stout woman with a voice like gravel, came to...

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The Crayon in the Baseboard

My childhood was a patchwork of military housing and my grandmother’s cramped row house in Ashwood, a mill town outside of Pittsburgh. I was the seventh of ten, and my...

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The Candy Man Cometh

I never believed in ghosts, not really. Not until the autumn I spent at my cousin’s farmhouse, buried in the fog of the Tennessee hills. My cousin Lena had invited...

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The Yellow Butterfly Photograph

The photograph sat propped against the chipped ceramic rooster on the kitchen windowsill, the one Iris had inherited from her own grandmother. It was a faded thing, the colors drained...

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The Gate in the Marsh

Our new home in coastal Maine was a fixer-upper, a salt-bitten Cape Cod that had seen better decades. My husband, a retired Marine, had taken a civilian job at the...

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The Unwelcome Runner

I was thirty-eight when I finally admitted to my brother, Leo, that I still couldn’t sleep without a light on. It was the summer we returned to our hometown to...

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The Last Request

I never used to believe in the things children claim to see. Ghosts, spirits, lingering presences—I dismissed them as figments of an overactive imagination, fueled by bedtime stories and the...

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The Keeper of the Quarry Road

I was barely four when the heat of that Oklahoma summer settled like a wool blanket over our little town of Red Hollow. My mother, a nurse at the county...

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The Painted Smile

It started with a chipped porcelain angel, a thrift store find from a dusty shelf in a town I barely remember. My daughter, Nora, had taken to it instantly, cradling...

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The Red-Trimmed Mirror

In the damp autumn of my ninth year, my family uprooted from the gray coastal town of my birth to a landlocked hamlet named Ashwick, where the houses leaned like...

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The Man in the Corner

Lily was seven the first time she told me about the man in the corridor. We were driving home from school, the autumn leaves skittering across the road like nervous...

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The Sandman’s Ledger

The house on Marrow Lane was never ours, not really. It was a temporary arrangement, a rental while we searched for something permanent. The walls were a sickly yellow, the...

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The Boy in the Open Door

I remember the day we visited Mrs. Kearney’s house in the low, grey town of Saltcoats. My mother was chatting with her old school friend, Fiona, and Fiona’s mother, a...

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