Ghost stories from Family

The Weight of August

My grandmother’s farm was a place of creaking floorboards and the smell of old hay, a relic of a time before the world got so loud. It was August 2016,...

Read Story →

The Custodian of Cedar Hollow

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. Growing up in the quiet town of Cedar Hollow, with its dense forests and the old lumber mill that had shut down decades...

Read Story →

The Last Broadcast

The autumn of 2007 found my family fractured, our roots torn from the soil of our New England hometown. The loss of my cousin, Marcus, in the Iraq War had...

Read Story →

The Last Game of Hide and Seek

I never believed in the supernatural, not really. Oh, I’d read the stories and watched the films, but I always found logical explanations. Then my brother Ethan died, and the...

Read Story →

The Paper Boat

I never believed in the supernatural, not truly, not until the winter my grandmother passed. I was twelve, and her death left a hollow in our family that no amount...

Read Story →

The Winter Heir

My name is Elias, and I’ve always felt a coldness in me that has nothing to do with the weather. It’s a presence, a weight that’s been with me since...

Read Story →

The Last Syringe

The last time I saw my father was on a cold, grey morning in late autumn. We stood in the gravel driveway of the old farmhouse he’d rented after the...

Read Story →

The Lantern in the Root Cellar

I was raised in my grandmother’s farmhouse on the vast, wheat-swept plains of the Nebraska panhandle. My childhood was a patchwork of golden afternoons and the deep, earthy smell of...

Read Story →

The Blanket of the Old House

My uncle used to tell me this story, and I always believed every word of it. It happened in the autumn of 1987, in a creaky Victorian house on the...

Read Story →

The Glass That Waits

The afternoon sun bled through the dusty window of the water refilling station, casting long, distorted shadows across the concrete floor. My father was sprawled on the old rattan sofa,...

Read Story →

The Riverside Gift

The summer of 1985 in the hill town of Bhalukpong was heavy with rain and the smell of wet earth. My father, Arjun, was sixteen then, and his younger brother,...

Read Story →

The Lantern on the Hill

The day my world tilted was the autumn the maples burned like stolen fire, and the old woman next door, Mrs. Kovac, finally stopped walking. For years, she was a...

Read Story →

The Drummer in the Basement

Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt the presence of things beyond this world. Whispers in the dark, a tug at my sleeve, the sense of being watched. It...

Read Story →

The House That Paid Its Debts

It began, as these things often do, with a wager. My grandmother, Elsie, was a woman who could stare down a storm and make it blink first. She had inherited...

Read Story →

The Lantern Keeper’s Due

The last entry I wrote scratched at an old wound, and I thought I had buried it deep enough. But the dead have a way of pulling threads, and I...

Read Story →

The Static in the Walls

My name is Elara, and I need to tell someone what’s been happening. It started two days ago, but I can’t shake the feeling that it began long before I...

Read Story →

The Last Polaroid

In 2015, I inherited my grandmother’s Victorian farmhouse in the fog-drenched hills of western Oregon. The house had been in the family for generations, but I hadn’t set foot in...

Read Story →

The Lantern Keeper’s Last Light

In the small coastal town of Saltmarsh, where the North Sea gnawed at the cliffs and the fog rolled in like a second tide, lived an old woman named Mabel...

Read Story →

The Last Jar of Blackcurrant Jam

The summer my mother turned seventeen, the world seemed to hold its breath. It was 1972, and the heat lay thick over the terraced houses of Millbrook, a small town...

Read Story →

The Unfinished Errand

I had been living with my grandmother since the sixth grade, in a house that smelled of cedar and old photographs. Her name was Elara, and though her body had...

Read Story →

The Music Box at 3:30

The call came at noon, a terse update from my sister: Mom was back in the hospital, complications from her hip replacement. I was three states away, useless, my hands...

Read Story →

The Clockmaker’s Gift

My grandmother, Elara, was a clockmaker. Her tiny shop, nestled between a bakery and a bookstore on the cobbled streets of our small town, was a sanctuary of ticking and...

Read Story →

The Shelf of Keepsakes

Mara moved into the old Harborside Apartments on a rain-soaked November morning. The building smelled of brine and old wood, and the landlord, a man with rheumy eyes and a...

Read Story →

The Lantern’s Last Light

The night the thrumming stopped, I was eleven, not twelve, and the weight of it pressed against my chest like a stone. Our house was a crooked clapboard thing on...

Read Story →