Ghost stories from Haunted Items

The Painted Smile

My grandmother’s house was a labyrinth of forgotten things, and the box of secondhand toys in the attic was just another layer of dust. I was eight, bored, and snooping...

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The Mirror That Walked

I was nineteen, living in the attic of an old farmhouse my parents had bought cheap after the previous owner died. The room was a long, narrow space with sloped...

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The Staple in the Floor

It began with a cardboard box of my belongings and a handshake that felt more like a lifeline. After my own run of bad luck, I’d landed on my feet...

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The Ragged Stitch

At the age of eight, I was a peculiar child, drawn more to the forgotten corners of the world than to the bright, sparkling things that delighted my peers. So...

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The Porcelain Visitor

The night air was thick with the scent of rain as Mara sat cross-legged on the floor of her new apartment, surrounded by half-open cardboard boxes. The move had been...

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The Static in the Glass

In the autumn of 2004, I moved into a cramped apartment on the third floor of a building that had once been a textile mill. The walls were thin, the...

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The Third Rotation

My partner, Leo, and I lived in a converted attic above my grandmother’s old bookstore, a place that always smelled of paper dust and something faintly metallic. We had been...

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The Lantern in the Attic

In the summer of 1987, our small town of Ashford, nestled in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, was shaken by a tragedy that would leave a permanent stain on...

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The Clockwork Visitor

I was six, and my grandmother, a woman with more stories than years, loved to drag me along on her visits to the old folk. I didn’t mind, not really....

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The Clockmaker’s Bargain

The summer I turned nine, my parents sent me to stay with my grandparents in their sprawling Victorian farmhouse at the edge of the Cranston Hollow. The house itself was...

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The Attic Door and the Moth

Our house on Maple Street had never felt right, not since the summer of 2005 when my little brother, Ben, died in a drowning accident at the lake. I was...

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The Ceramic Guardian of Mulberry Lane

My first brush with the uncanny didn’t happen in a creaking Victorian mansion or a fog-choked cemetery. It happened in a sunlit suburban split-level on Mulberry Lane, in the summer...

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The Hushing Mannequin

That autumn, my family moved to a quiet cul-de-sac in the outskirts of Millbrook, a town known for its pumpkin patches and overly friendly neighbors. My mom, trying to make...

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The Last Tenant of Ashford Hall

I never thought of myself as particularly sensitive. Sure, I sometimes knew someone was behind me before I saw them, and I could feel when a room was wrong, like...

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The Porcelain Gaze

I never thought much about the house on Maple Street, three doors down from my own. My grandmother, Edna, had lived there for over forty years, and it was a...

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The Grotto of Unwoven Threads

In the autumn of 2016, I was a film student at a small college in the Pacific Northwest, scraping together funds for a short horror anthology. My previous projects had...

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The Cartridge That Remembers

My girlfriend, Dana, and I—Marcus—had been counting down the days to that Saturday. University had swallowed our summer whole, and the only thing keeping us sane was the promise of...

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The Boat in the Attic

Ten years have passed since I lived in that cramped apartment above the ancient liquor store on Wabash Avenue, in the decaying industrial district of Gary, Indiana. The building was...

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The Salt Line and the Unnamed

I was seventeen the summer my father decided to teach me about the unseen. We lived in a converted lighthouse on a rocky spit of coast, where the fog rolled...

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The Weight of Dead Hours

The first time I noticed the clock, I was alone in the office, which was nothing new. I’d been working for Grant for nearly a year, managing the books and...

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