Ghost stories from Family

The Antique Music Box

I live in a small coastal town in Portugal, and I’m nineteen. My grandmother, Avó Rosa, passed away two years ago after a long battle with lung disease. She had...

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The Scent of Rain on Old Wood

I was nine, lying on the pull-out couch in the den of my Aunt Ruth’s farmhouse, the one that had belonged to her mother, my great-grandmother, who had died before...

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The Stained Linens of Hollow Creek

My grandfather, Elias, perished from a stroke that left his left side paralyzed and his mind trapped in a failing body. In his final year, he rotated between our home...

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The Uniform in the Attic

My grandfather on my father’s side was a soldier, or so I believed. I never met him—he died before I was born—but his faded photographs in our old family album...

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The Glass Chime

The house we built on Cedar Ridge was a fortress of silence. Twelve years of flawless nights, no creaking timbers, no phantom drafts. It was, as my wife Margaret often...

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The Last Cruise Night

My father, Arthur, had been best friends with Marcus since high school. They shared everything: a love for classic cars, late-night poker games, and the kind of unspoken bond that...

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The Last Kiss on the Stairwell

It was the summer of the heatwave, the kind that made the asphalt shimmer and the air thick as wool. I was dating a man named Elias, whose father, a...

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The Linen Press

When my Aunt Jess died, we inherited her farmhouse at the edge of the marsh. She’d been gone six days, and my mother was the first to face the task...

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The Last Inventory

Marta had always considered herself a skeptic with an open mind. She loved ghost stories but never believed they could touch her world. That all changed when she inherited her...

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The Hollow Playground

In the autumn of 2011, thirteen-year-old Maya found herself trapped in the suffocating heat of her father’s apartment in the dusty outskirts of Amarillo, Texas. Her mother had flown to...

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The Couch That Ate the Moonlight

The summer of 1985 in our duplex on Sable Terrace was a haze of sun-bleached afternoons and chalk-dusted sidewalks. We were five families crammed into three floors, a labyrinth of...

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The Cinder Man

Before I was born, my great-uncle Elias died. He was burned alive in a transformer explosion while repairing a substation on the edge of my great-grandmother’s farm in the Texas...

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The Static Between Calls

In April of 2003, I was twelve, navigating the labyrinth of seventh grade and the city bus system that spat me out an hour from home. My cell phone, a...

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The Last Clear Day

On a Tuesday in late October, the sky over our small town of Stillwater was so blue it hurt to look at. I was twelve, and my mother and I...

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The Cinder-Filled Draft

The summer I turned twelve, my parents sent me to stay with my great-aunt Mabel in her crumbling Victorian house on the edge of the Ashfall Preserve. The preserve was...

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The Blue Lantern at Mirror Lake

Every summer, my grandmother Mable and I would drive to her cabin on Mirror Lake. The lake was a perfect circle of black water ringed by pines, and the cabin...

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The Weight of Ash

The night after the funeral, I checked into the old Riverview Motel on the outskirts of Copper Creek, a town I’d only passed through with Lucas a lifetime ago. The...

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The Last Passenger

My father died on a Tuesday, three days before Thanksgiving. The coroner said it was a massive coronary, a blood clot that traveled from his leg to his heart. He...

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The Empty Setting

It wasn’t until the funeral was over and the casserole dishes were empty that the house seemed to exhale. Nora watched her mother’s friends drift through the kitchen like ghosts...

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The Silent Room

In the autumn of 2004, my family gathered at my grandfather’s dilapidated farmhouse in rural Kansas, a place out of time with its peeling wallpaper and creaking floors. Grandfather had...

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The Sunken Plot

Before her death, Mira had purchased a burial plot beside her beloved husband’s grave, a pact of eternity she had made when he passed. But when she moved to Canada...

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The Cinder Box

The box sat on the mantle like a squat black toad, its brass corners tarnished to a sickly green. Inside were Grandma Hattie’s ashes, though ‘ashes’ felt like a lie;...

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The Red Balloon’s Message

In the quiet town of Cedar Hollow, nestled between fog-draped hills, the Ashcroft family had known sorrow. Their eldest, Marlene, had lost her daughter, Lily, in the cold February of...

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The Cold Red Visitor

I was seven when I traded my bath toys for a shower head, feeling every bit the grown-up with my own bottle of strawberry shampoo. It was late August, and...

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