Ghost stories from Friends Visits

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,...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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The Last Coin

My grandfather, Elias, was the anchor of my childhood. He was the one who taught me the proper way to skip stones, the secret to perfecting a peanut butter and...

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The Leather Vest at the Frozen Lake

My father, Elias, vanished into the Blue Mountains during a freak late-autumn storm in 2011. He was a forester, a man of the trees, and the cold that took him...

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The Last Portrait of Aunt Meera

I never thought I would see her again. The last time I’d laid eyes on my aunt was in 2001, when I was just a kid, and the memory of...

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My grandmother, whom I called Mags, was my whole world. We spent countless afternoons piecing together thousand-piece puzzles of windswept coasts and autumn forests, and we’d wander the fields behind...

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The Keeper of Ash and Oranges

Let me tell you about my Uncle Rowan. He wasn’t my uncle by blood, but a close family friend who’d earned the title. Rowan was a giant of a man...

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The Salted Timber

My grandmother, Elara, had built this house with her own hands, every beam and nail chosen to her liking. She was a woman of quiet superstitions, and the house reflected...

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The Keeper of the Lace

The first time I saw the lace was on a Tuesday, the last day of November. I was unpacking my grandmother’s china, a task I’d been avoiding for weeks, and...

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The Iron Horse’s Last Run

In the autumn of 1962, eleven-year-old Eileen O’Malley walked the cobbled streets of Derry’s Bogside, her new maroon blazer stiff with starch, her satchel heavy with books. The morning fog...

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The Marrow of Winter

In the deep of a North Dakota December, the town of Grafton lay buried under a week of unbroken snowfall. Miles of skeletal cottonwoods lined the frozen river, their branches...

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The Last Unplayed Track

The day they lowered Marcus into the ground, I stood at the edge of the crowd holding the silver armband I’d found in his desk drawer. It wasn’t the one...

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