Ghost stories from Demons

The Salt and the Seventh Step

I was sixteen when I first understood that some stains don’t wash out with water or time. My name is Theo, and I’ve been able to see things others can’t...

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The Ash-Rot Choir

In the late spring of 2009, I found myself at a rural retreat center perched on the edge of a forgotten forest. The place was a converted convent, its walls...

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The Hangman’s Fracture

It started with a smell—old copper and burnt cloves—that lingered in my studio no matter how many windows I cracked. My friend, Elena, a sculptor with steady hands, began complaining...

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The Ledger of Hollow Creek

The autumn of 1842 lay heavy over the Sawyer homestead, a sprawling 900-acre tract along the eastern bend of Hollow Creek. Margaret Sawyer, widowed two years prior, ran the farm...

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The Glass Garden

The year was 1966, and the world was still reeling from the aftershocks of a war that had reshaped borders and destinies. My father, a retired railway officer, had chosen...

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The Hanging Thread

I never intended to write this down. In fact, I promised myself I wouldn’t. But after what happened, I can’t keep it inside. If you’re reading this, maybe you’ve felt...

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The Chalk Outline in the Rain

I’ve always had a peculiar gift, one that I never asked for and rarely speak about. It began in my early adolescence, a time of turbulence and confusion, when the...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

It was the summer I turned thirteen, and the heat lay over our town like a wet wool blanket. My parents, both doctors, were working endless shifts at the county...

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The Hollow Between Heartbeats

The night the power lines snapped in the frozen marsh, I stopped believing in coincidences. My brother, Marcus, had died seven months earlier in a logging accident—a chain snapped, a...

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The Stitcher’s Pattern

My name is Eleanor, and I’ve been a seamstress for thirty years. I live in a small, cluttered apartment above my shop, ‘Eleanor’s Alterations,’ nestled between a bustling bakery and...

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The Red Ledger

In the summer of 1991, my older sister Clara took a job at a dusty accounting firm in the outskirts of San Marcos, a town that still smelled of harvest...

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The Painted Door

The summer of 2004 in the small town of Meridian, Ohio, was stifling, the kind of heat that made the air thick and the cicadas scream. My mother had just...

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The Static in the Walls

After the incident at the Meridian Trust building, I thought I’d left it all behind. The cold spots, the flickering lights, the whispers that seemed to come from the ventilation...

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The Pantry of Smells

My name is Elara, and I’ve always had a peculiar sensitivity to the unseen. Since childhood, I could feel the emotional residue left in spaces, like a faint scent of...

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The Brass Oil Lamp

My name is Anjali, and I was born in a small village in Tamil Nadu, but I’ve spent most of my life in Toronto. I consider myself spiritual, though I...

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The Painted Door

The house on Meridian Lane had always felt like a stranger’s skin stretched over bones that didn’t quite fit. I never said it aloud, but every creak of the floorboards,...

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The Fifth of January

My name is Mara, and I’m thirteen. I know that sounds young, but when the walls of your own room start to feel like they’re pressing in on you, age...

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The Unraveling of Hollow Creek

The house on Hollow Creek Lane had a way of swallowing sound. The floorboards never creaked, the wind never whispered through the gaps in the windows, and even the old...

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The Cleft

The Cleft started as a crack in the plaster above the kitchen sink. I noticed it one Tuesday, a hairline fracture that seemed to widen every time I washed dishes....

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The Stiff Creep

I was at my friend’s place, a cramped studio above a laundromat that smelled of soap and mildew. The party was small, and I’d just come from the kitchen with...

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The Hand on the Bog

I was twenty-seven when my grandmother died and left me her cottage in the marshlands of coastal Georgia. I had grown up in Ohio, but after years of city noise...

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The Keeper of the Deep

When I was six, my family moved to the port town of Ambergris, a place where the fog rolled in off the ocean like a shroud and the streets were...

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The Cinder Room

My brother and I, we were two halves of the same soul, or so I’d always believed. Growing up in the narrow, fog-swallowed streets of a coastal town, we shared...

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The Charred Halo

In the suffocating heat of a New Mexico summer, Maya lived alone in a crumbling adobe house at the edge of the desert. The land was dry, cracked, and unforgiving,...

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