Ghost stories from Family

The Wooden Solitaire Board

My great-uncle Fergus was a man of few words and many habits. He lived alone in a crooked timber house at the edge of the Ponderosa Pine forest, where the...

Read Story →

The Hour of the Long Dark

The first thing I noticed was the way the streetlights seemed to dim as I drove through the outskirts of Fairbanks, as if the town itself was holding its breath....

Read Story →

The Porcelain Smile

The winter of my fifth year was painted in shades of grey and the sharp, clean scent of pine. We lived in a cramped apartment above my mother’s bakery, a...

Read Story →

The Blue Hour Visit

I had never believed in ghosts, not really. The dead were gone, and the living had to carry on. But when Marcus died—a stupid, senseless fall from his own roof—I...

Read Story →

The Late Shift at the Lighthouse

The lighthouse at Cape Morrow had been automated for twenty years, a relic of a bygone era. When the storm knocked out the grid, the old keeper’s quarters became my...

Read Story →

The Lantern of June

June had always been a month of endings for the Whitfield family, but this year it felt like the final page had been torn out. When the funeral director called...

Read Story →

The Sentinel in the Static

It was a Tuesday in late April, and the house on Maple Street felt heavier than usual. I’d been awake since three, unable to shake the restless feeling that had...

Read Story →

The Ledger in the Limewood

Our family’s old hunting lodge, Raven’s Hollow, sat deep in the Appalachian woods, a two-hour drive from the nearest town of Millbrook. It had been in our family since the...

Read Story →

The Last Visit

I first met Marcus at a support group for amputees, though he was the last person you’d expect to find there. He’d lost both legs below the knee in a...

Read Story →

The Leaf-Buried Hour

October 30, 1988. I was seventeen, and I had a rule about guys: the older, the better. That’s how I ended up with Cole, a twenty-year-old ex-Marine who smelled like...

Read Story →

My Gran In The Garden Talking To My Niece

This story happened a couple of years ago in my garden in County Durham, England. I’d also like to say my Gran passed away in 2006 from Alzheimer’s disease. One...

Read Story →

The Last Photograph

The Ozarks were quiet in the winter of 1972, a stillness that pressed against the windows of our farmhouse like a held breath. I was thirty-two, married to a man...

Read Story →

The Last Sweater

The night Dr. Alvarez told me he was gone, the hospital hallway smelled of rubbing alcohol and something floral, like the cheap air freshener they used to mask death. I...

Read Story →

The Man in the Saffron Uniform

It was the Tuesday after Easter, and the rain had turned the gravel driveway into a quagmire. I was visiting my aunt Clara at her crumbling farmhouse, a place that...

Read Story →

The Cradle of Ash

The summer heat clung to the cracked vinyl seats of the old Ford as we rolled through the Badlands, the landscape shifting from the flat, dusty plains of the reservation...

Read Story →

The Map of Unfinished Rooms

In the autumn of 2004, I was seeing a woman named Elara, whom I’d known since college. She had inherited her late father’s property in the rolling hills of western...

Read Story →

The Petal Fall

I was thirteen when my grandmother passed away. The news came on a bitter January morning, but I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the Wisconsin frost....

Read Story →

The Keeper of the Hollow

The trouble began on the first of August, 2012, the day my son, Toby, turned seven. We had moved to the old farmhouse in Vermont just a month prior, seeking...

Read Story →

The Blue Light of March

It was the first week of March, 2003, when the television set in the old farmhouse began to hum. Not the usual electrical hum, but a low, rhythmic thrum that...

Read Story →

The Trembling Ash

The summer after my grandmother, Elsie, died, I moved into her old house to help my grandfather, Arthur, cope with the loss. The house still smelled of her lavender sachets...

Read Story →

The Loom of Nightfall

After my grandmother passed, we gathered at her cliffside cottage to sort through a lifetime of belongings. The air was thick with salt and cedar, and her old spinning wheel...

Read Story →

The Man on the Landing

My cousin, Daniel, was six when he lost his fear. Not just a lack of fear, but a total absence of it. He’d walk through the dark woods behind our...

Read Story →

The Lighthouse Keeper’s Last Signal

I was nineteen when I first met Elias. He was the night janitor at the old Gateside Museum, a wiry man with a crooked smile and a habit of humming...

Read Story →

The Last Blueprint

It’s been three years since I last saw Marisol, though I never kept count. We were inseparable in high school—she with her quick tongue and sharper mind, me with my...

Read Story →