Ghost stories from Family

The Seventh Plate

In the autumn of her thirty-second year, Mara returned to her family’s farmhouse for the memorial supper of her great-uncle, a man she had never met but whose presence loomed...

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The Open Shutters

The house on Maple Street had never felt like mine, even after all these years. My ex-husband’s mother, Edith, lived there now, alone since her husband Harold had passed away...

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The Tarnished Frame

The house on Cedar Lane had always been a bit too quiet, even for a place nestled in the woods. I lived there with my mother, my sister having just...

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The Blue Envelope

The last time I saw my father alive, he was sitting in a wheelchair by the window of the Suncrest Rehabilitation Center, staring at the parking lot. He was a...

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The Call at Gate 12

My first brush with the uncanny happened when I was twelve, and the memory clings to me like a cold draft that follows no window. My father had died when...

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The Copper Key

The house on Bramble Lane was a fixer-upper that my parents bought for a song, but it sang back in ways we didn’t expect. It was a Victorian with peeling...

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The Marigold Message

The dream always began the same way: an endless, velvet dark, so thick it felt like a physical weight against my eyelids. Then, a voice, not quite a sound, more...

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The Cane’s Cadence

My aunt Marta first noticed it three nights after Abuela Rosa passed. Marta lived in a small, salt-worn house on the edge of a fishing village in Costa Rica, where...

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The Lantern’s Wrath

My cousin Eli and I were twelve and thirteen that summer, old enough to feel brave and foolish enough to test it. The town of Murkwell was built on a...

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The Black Bloom

In the autumn of 2012, after my father’s sudden passing, I found myself in a small, sun-bleached town in Portugal, teaching English to uninterested teenagers. The grief was a heavy...

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The Riverbed Offering

In the small mountain village of Kestrel’s Rest, everyone knew everyone, and the river that ran through it was the lifeblood of the community. When young Elara drowned in the...

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The Grain in the Wall

October 2019, a small town in the Pacific Northwest. I was at my desk at the county records office, buried under deeds and property histories, when my sister called. Our...

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The Glass Door on the Bay

I never believed in ghosts, not really. I mean, I wanted to, especially after my grandma passed and then my mom. But wanting and believing are two different things, aren’t...

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The Porcelain Key

The old farmhouse at the edge of Cedar Hollow had always been a place of creaks and whispers, but for thirteen-year-old Elara, it was simply home. Her father had died...

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The Unfinished Frame

It happened during my sophomore year at a small coastal college, but I was back home for winter break. The house I grew up in sat on the edge of...

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The Visiting Card

It started three weeks after I moved into the old farmhouse, the one with the crooked weather vane that always pointed west, no matter the wind. The previous owner had...

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The Last Blueprint

Elena had always believed that a house was more than wood and nails; it was a vessel for memories. When she and her husband, Marcus, bought the plot of land...

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The Blue Chair’s Debt

The day I agreed to help my great-aunt Mabel, I expected to deal with old furniture and distant memories. She’d called me in a state, saying that the armchair in...

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The Scent of Pineapple Bread

My grandmother, Lani, was born and raised in Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii, but she spent her last years in a small, dusty town in Arizona, where she...

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The Last Rite of the Hollow Drum

The snow came early that year, blanketing the reservation in a silence so deep it felt like a held breath. My cousin Ela, who had always looked at me with...

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The Moth-Hour Visitor

In the autumn of 1994, I drove to a forgotten chapel in the hills of West Virginia, where my grandmother’s family had once gathered for a biannual reunion. The place...

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The Third Night of the Lantern

In the autumn of 2011, I was twenty-two, living in the quiet, rain-soaked town of Ashford, Oregon. My grandmother had passed away, and as per our family’s old traditions, we...

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The Last Storm

The hospital room was quiet save for the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor and the distant rumble of thunder. Agnes had been unconscious for three days, her frail body...

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The Salt Road

My grandmother always said that the old house we lived in was a sieve. It let things in, she’d whisper, and sometimes it let things out. I didn’t understand her...

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