Ghost stories from Family

The Clock in the Foyer

The old farmhouse had been in our family for generations, and its walls were steeped in the quiet memory of those who had lived and died within them. My grandmother,...

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The Clockwork Hummingbird

It was October of 2019, and I had spent the better part of a year in a fog of grief and silence. My name is Eleanor, and I lived in...

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The Mold of Saint Elmo

I was sixteen when I first saw the thing in the boiler room of St. Elmo’s Orphanage, the same year I began hearing the damp whispers that would follow me...

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The Basket Maker of Dawn

In the half-light of a November morning, when the fog off the Padma River turned the world into a gray, breathing thing, I would pedal my bicycle along the cracked...

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The Amethyst Visitors

In the autumn of 2012, we brought home our twin daughters, Lily and Rose, from the hospital. Lily had a congenital heart defect, and her first months were a blur...

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The Hollow Playmate

The summer I turned eight, my parents sent me to stay with my Aunt Remedios in the dusty town of San Cipriano. The house was a relic of another century,...

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The Last Ferry to Meridian

My father, Arthur, passed away in October, after a long battle with a degenerative nerve condition. The disease had slowly robbed him of his mobility and his speech, leaving him...

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The Last Batch of Papads

In the sweltering summer of 2011, my mother, Nalini, had a ritual she followed every year: making papads. She would lay them out on white cotton cloths across the flat...

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The Cinder Man

Eight months ago, I got a call from Marcus, a kid I’d known in middle school. I can’t say I’d been waiting for it, but I realized after I hung...

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The Fallen Frame

On the first Tuesday of March, just after lunch, I received a text from my oldest child, Miriam. The message read simply: ‘Something is off.’ I knew better than to...

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The Weight of Midnight

I was seventeen, and the world had become a cage of glass and silence. My brother, Leo, had been the only one who understood me, and when he drove his...

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The Polished Floor

It was the summer I turned twelve, and my mother had sent me to stay with my great-aunt, whom everyone called ‘Mama Vee,’ at her small country church in the...

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The Lane of Static

The first thing I noticed was the hallway clock. It had stopped at 3:17 AM, and the second hand was twitching, not ticking, like a trapped insect. I live in...

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The Glass That Held the Rain

I was never the same after I came back from the water. Dr. Halvorsen, the town’s old physician, told my parents I was lucky, that most children don’t survive a...

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The Parasol Keeper

My name is Elara, and I have always seen things that others cannot. My earliest memory is of a woman in a Victorian dress holding a lace parasol, standing at...

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The Indentation

After my father died, I thought the strange occurrences would stop. He had been a heavy smoker, and the smell of tobacco lingered in the house like a ghost itself....

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The Lantern Keeper

The evening had settled into that warm, honeyed lull that only comes with a contented family at home. Mara and I were sprawled on the living room rug, our three-year-old...

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The Last Visit

I remember the night it happened, back when I was in the eighth grade, though I’m a junior in college now. It was a summer night, hot and humid, and...

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The Keeper of the Hollow Pines

My name is Elias Thorne, and I never expected to write this down. I’ve always been a skeptic, a man of science, a botanist who prefers the logic of photosynthesis...

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The Last Vestibule

My family was a constellation, our orbits fixed and overlapping. I was the smallest star, forever tethered to my mother’s gravity, but my true sun was my father. He was...

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The Board Game Boy

Our house in Essex, Massachusetts, had stood since 1770, a crooked, salt-worn colonial that creaked like a ship at anchor. I was seven in 1982, and my world was small:...

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The Late Shift

My grandmother used to say that the dead don’t leave us; they just change their address. I never understood that until I started working the night shift at the St....

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The Visitor at Dawn

I remember the summer of 2007, when my grandmother died. That’s when the dreams started. Not the kind of dreams you forget, but the ones that cling to you like...

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The Crick in the Floorboards

The rain hammered the tin roof of the old farmhouse like a relentless drummer, and the wind moaned through the eaves. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of...

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