Ghost stories from Friends Visits

The Clockwork Teeth

In the autumn of 1992, the desert heat still clung to the prefab housing of Fort Meridian, a sprawling Air Force installation that seemed to float on a sea of...

Read Story →

The Cat’s Eye Marble

My mother, Lena, has always had a gift for speaking with the dead, a talent she inherited from her grandmother. She never spoke of it openly, but I, being a...

Read Story →

The Salt and the Static

The call came on a Tuesday, not a Saturday, and it wasn’t about a choir practice. It was a text from my sister, Lila, her words clipped and cold: ‘Come...

Read Story →

The Long-Distance Call

The morning Lynne learned of her brother’s death, the sky was the color of old dishwater, and the rain fell in sheets, drumming against the tin roof of her rented...

Read Story →

The Hollow Between the Walls

I never believed in ghosts, not until the winter my grandmother passed and the house on Hemlock Lane began to breathe differently. The place was a cramped Victorian inherited from...

Read Story →

The Cattail Field Promise

The first time I noticed Elias, he was a smudge of khaki and mud at the edge of the cattail field behind our apartment complex. I was nine, new to...

Read Story →

The Glass Jar of Moonlight

In the quiet outskirts of Cedar Falls, a place where the forest crept close to the backyards and the streetlights hummed with a tired buzz, I spent my early childhood....

Read Story →

The Perpetual Ring

The last time I saw my brother Carl, he was laughing, his dry, barking laugh that always made me feel lighter. He had insisted on a last-minute camping trip to...

Read Story →

The Paint and the Chill

In the fall of 2004, I moved into a small craftsman bungalow in the outskirts of Bakersfield, California. My friend Elena had inherited it from her grandmother, who had passed...

Read Story →

The Guardian’s Grip

I never knew my mother’s face, only the hollow space she left behind. At three, memories are fragile things, more sensation than image. I recall a warmth, a scent of...

Read Story →

The Bone-Garden Rapture

My name is Elena, and I’ve never told anyone about the weekend I spent at the Marek Funeral Home. My best friend from college, Mira, had invited me to her...

Read Story →

The Watcher in the Hallway

For weeks, I’ve been trying to make sense of the things that happened in that old house on Hemlock Lane. My name is Maya, and when I was six, I...

Read Story →

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 →