Ghost stories from Exorcisms

The Empty Station

It was the summer I turned seventeen, the summer after my father’s funeral, and I’d started driving at night just to feel something other than the cold knot in my...

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The Last Rakhi

The monsoon had turned the narrow lanes of Chandrapur into a maze of slick, black stones and overflowing drains. I remember the smell of damp earth and marigold, the cloying...

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The Red Door Incident

I never believed in ghosts until I started working as a night orderly at Saint Dymphna’s, a behavioral health facility tucked in the pine woods of northern Maine. The place...

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The Gutter’s Thirst

In the autumn of 2014, the rains had turned the streets of Chandni Chowk into a ribbon of slick, black mirrors. I had returned to Old Delhi after years in...

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The Tin Cross on Route 9

In the autumn of 1954, the farmlands of central Kansas lay flat as a grave marker, and I, a boy of nine, knew every rut in the dirt road that...

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The Autumn Guest

My wedding was a constellation of borrowed lace and my mother’s stubborn optimism, pinned together with safety pins and hope. I was twenty-four, a hummingbird of excitement, flitting between the...

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The Yellow Cake Incident

I’ve told this story to countless people, and they always smile and nod, thinking I’m spinning a yarn. But I know the truth, and there are others like me out...

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The Ruined Granary of Jhajjar

The village of Jhajjar in the arid plains of Rajasthan was not marked on most maps, and its inhabitants liked it that way. They were a superstitious lot, whispering about...

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The Spice Seller’s Bargain

I am Arjun, a 31-year-old marine biologist from Kochi, and for years I dismissed the tales my grandmother told as the fanciful inventions of an old woman raised on folklore....

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The Mason Jar Pact

In the fall of ’87, I was twelve years old, living in a small farmhouse outside of Ruth, Nevada, with my father, Elias, and his new wife, Sylvia. The nearest...

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The Sixth Morning

My name is Noor, and I’m from the island of Rodrigues. This happened last August, during the hottest week of the year. I remember the exact moment because the clock...

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The Hollow Cradle

In the autumn of 1994, on a decaying farmstead surrounded by skeletal oaks, my father, Elias, tended to my mother, Clara, as she withered after my birth. We were a...

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The Loop of Unmaking

The move came without warning, as all transfers do. My father, a cautious man who measured risk in columns and ledgers, had been posted to the coastal town of Verasur,...

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The Stitching Hour

It was the summer of ’74 when my grandmother, Elara, finally agreed to leave her room. The house had become a mausoleum after grandfather’s passing, and her mother-in-law, a woman...

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The Marble Sunroom

My grandmother told me this story when I was a child, but it wasn’t until years later that I understood the weight of it. It happened in a town called...

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The Constant Circle

The house my mother grew up in had a name, though no one remembered why it was called The Constant. It stood at the edge of a marsh, its wooden...

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The Salt Line

I never believed in the devil. Ghosts, maybe, in a vague, let’s-not-think-too-hard-about-it way. But demons, possession, that was Hollywood nonsense. Then I met Elias, and I spent a night in...

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The Count of the Hollow

My grandmother never spoke of her childhood except in fragments, like pieces of a shattered mirror she was afraid to reassemble. She said that when she was seven, she wandered...

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The Hollow Hearth

After weeks of relentless phone calls and a desperate, cross-country drive, Elena finally stood on the cracked porch of the house where her husband, Marcus, had been living with his...

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The Resonance Within the Static

Mara Linwood had always prided herself on her rationality, her feet firmly planted in the tangible world. She was a structural engineer, a person who trusted calculations and blueprints over...

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The Photograph in the Corridor

A year after we moved into our new apartment on the outskirts of Pune, my mother began complaining of a recurring presence in the hall. Our home was a modest...

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The Faded Veil of Khopoli

In the sweltering summer of 1967, Meera, a young bride recently married into the Deshmukh family, moved to the small town of Khopoli, nestled between the Sahyadri hills and a...

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The Saltwater Vigil

The year the tide pulled everything away, my sister Mira and I were still young enough to believe the ocean had secrets worth keeping. Our family lived in a crooked...

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The Corridor of Static

Dale had never believed in much of anything, least of all the divine. He’d spent his thirty-two years on Earth with his feet planted firmly in the material world, a...

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