Ghost stories from Demons

The Pine Hollow Incident

In the autumn of 1987, the town of Pine Hollow was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone, and the woods that bordered the town were both a playground...

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The Lantern in the Saltmarsh

I’ve always been a little too attuned to the world beyond the veil. It’s a gift, my grandmother called it, but it always felt more like a curse. This particular...

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The Bamboo Curtain

This happened three years before the hospital in the hills took my sight as they opened my third eye. I was living in a rented cottage on the outskirts of...

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The Night the Lamplight Died

I was a child who feared the dark and the flickering shapes that moved just beyond the edge of sleep. My sanctuary was our home in the quiet town of...

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The Lamplight on Hollow Row

In our town, there was a stretch of road known as Hollow Row. It wasn’t a cemetery, but an old, winding lane lined with gnarled oaks and abandoned mansions that...

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The Bone Chandelier

I was six when the woman with the hollow eyes came to our door. Her name was Mrs. Kestrel, and she said she carried something that wasn’t hers. We lived...

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The Blue Candle Vigil

The first time I saw the blue flame, I was eleven, sitting cross-legged on the cold linoleum of our kitchen in the old farmhouse on Marrow Lane. My grandmother, Vera,...

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The Cardboard Box

I never believed in ghosts until that New Year’s week in Omaha, Nebraska. My family had scattered for the holidays, and I found myself tagging along with my aunt and...

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The Painted Path

I never thought I’d tell this story, but lately, I’ve felt this urge to get it out before it buries me completely. My name is Elias, and I’m nineteen now....

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The Coil in the Basement

In the autumn of 1982, when I was eleven, my family moved into a sprawling Victorian house in the hills of western Massachusetts. The house had been vacant for years,...

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The Cartographer’s Ledger

My name is Wren, and I am a mapmaker. Not the kind that draws coastlines and mountain ranges for adventurers, but the kind that charts the boundaries of the human...

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The Rope in the Ceiling

In the autumn of 1978, my mother, my two brothers, and I lived in a converted stable behind the old Grimaldi mansion, which had been divided into flats. My room...

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The Mannequin in the Attic

In the autumn of 2004, I was a senior at St. Augustine’s Academy, a boarding school housed in a converted Victorian mansion in the mountains of Vermont. The building was...

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The Static in the Walls

Maya had always been drawn to quiet places. The old farmhouse she and Adrian had rented sat on the edge of a sun-scorched field, its bones creaking with age. She...

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The Lily-Marsh Bargain

Arjun had always loved the festival season. Not for the rituals or the crowds, but for the escape it offered. At sixteen, he was already tired of the small, dusty...

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The Last Seam

The summer I turned sixteen, my grandmother’s house became a mausoleum of half-finished things. She had died in March, and my mother, in her grief, had asked me to sort...

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The Cinder Man in the Root Cellar

I never believed in ghosts until I inherited my great-aunt Thirza’s farmhouse. She died of a stroke, they said, but when I found her in the root cellar, face down...

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The Eclipse Pupil

On the morning of the 22nd of July, 2009, Dr. Meera Krishnan was pacing her consulting room in the north of England, occasionally glancing at the television screen where a...

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The Ledger of Grief

It began on a Tuesday, the day I found Marcus’s note. Not a suicide note—that would have been too neat. It was a grocery list, tucked into his coat pocket...

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The Crying Walls

My name is Clara Vance, and I’ve been living in the same duplex in the outskirts of Austin, Texas for the past six years. It’s a modest place, with a...

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The Signpost of Salt and Ash

In the autumn of 2014, a group of college students heard a tale about the abandoned mining town of Gray Hollow, tucked into the hills behind the old county fairgrounds....

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The Attic Choir

I’d been living with my friend Marcus for six months when I learned why he never went into the attic. The house was an old Victorian, creaky and drafty, but...

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The Cradle of Static

Mara’s earliest memory was not of her mother’s face but of the humming. A low, electric thrum that seemed to come from the walls, the floor, the very air of...

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The Harvest of the Painted Veil

The summer I turned seventeen, my family moved to the town of Merrow, a place that seemed to exist only in the margins of old maps, where the fog clung...

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