Ghost stories from Lights

The Lantern of Persistent Motion

Marta and I had just settled into our new apartment above a shuttered cannery in the small coastal town of Dunmore. The place was a relic, with peeling paint and...

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The Orchard’s Debt

It was the tail end of August when I found myself at my aunt’s cabin, tucked away in the northern foothills. The place had been in the family for decades,...

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The Static Garden

My name is Lena, and I have a problem. It’s not the kind of problem you can see, or touch, or even explain to a therapist without them slowly backing...

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The Painted Veil

The first time I saw the thin man, I was eight years old, sitting on the cracked linoleum floor of our kitchen in the old Victorian house on Hemlock Lane....

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The Lantern in the Glass

I swear on my mother’s grave that everything I’m about to tell you happened exactly as I describe it. No embellishments, no tricks of the mind. It was a Tuesday,...

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The Lantern in the Canopy

My name is Ethan, and I’m seventeen now, but the event I’m about to describe happened when I was thirteen, in the autumn of 2019. I lived in a small...

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The Lantern in the Static

It began with a flicker in the bathroom mirror, a glint of gold that wasn’t the reflection of the hallway light. I was braiding my hair for bed, and there...

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The Last Frame

Three autumns ago, I drove with my friends to an open-air music festival at the old fairgrounds outside Millbrook. The air was crisp, the kind of cool that makes you...

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The Clockwork Hum

The old mill had been silent for a decade, its waterwheel choked with weeds and its gears rusted into stillness. I lived across the river in a converted warehouse, my...

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The Amber Pane

Marta lived in a restored farmhouse on the edge of the county, where the fields rolled into a dense pine forest. Her husband, Leo, often worked late shifts, leaving her...

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The Lantern’s Frequency

When our band, The Hollow Pines, started renting the old mill house at the edge of Reed Creek, we thought the seclusion was perfect for late-night jam sessions. The nearest...

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The Moth’s Veil

Elena had always lived with one foot in the unseen. Growing up in the quiet town of Larkspur, she’d learned to read the flicker of porch lights as a sign...

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The Hollow Click

On the night of October 12th, 2019, I returned to my apartment in the old Meridian building, a relic from the 1920s with its creaking floors and radiators that clanked...

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The Mote in the Scheduler’s Eye

I’ve worked the night shift in the security hub of Pelican Bay Medical Center for eleven years. The job is mostly monotony: staring at a wall of screens that blink...

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The Pulse of the Bog

When we traded the endless sun of Florida for the damp, grey hills of County Donegal, I thought I was prepared for a change. The cottage, a squat stone building...

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The Lantern in the Fog

Three years have passed since that night in my rented cottage on the edge of the Cranmore Fen, and still, the memory claws at me with icy fingers. I’ve told...

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The Atlas Protocol

I never thought the night shift at the Meridian Data Center would land me in the middle of a supernatural event, but last Friday, at 2:47 AM, I saw something...

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The Marigold Grave

I am forty-two, and my two sons, Elias and Julian, are seventeen. We had come to rural Vermont because my father, Harold, had suffered a stroke and lay in a...

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The Lantern That Watched

Mara had always prided herself on her rationality. A scientist by training, she sought natural explanations for everything. When she moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the...

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The Lantern in the Hills

It was late autumn in the town of Millbrook, and the air smelled of wet leaves and chimney smoke. I was seventeen, and my world revolved around the garage band...

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The Hollow Thresher

The dust on the county road was thick enough to swallow footprints, and for Elian, it was just another Tuesday in the fall of 1932. The one-room schoolhouse at Clearwater...

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The Clockwork Hum

In the crooked little house on Mulberry Lane, where the floorboards groaned like old bones and the wallpaper peeled in dark, wet patches, I lived with my mother and my...

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The Lobby Light

I worked the night shift at St. Jude’s Memorial, a sprawling, aging hospital on the outskirts of Phoenix. My post was the fourth floor, but during my breaks, I’d head...

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Dr. Emma Lawson had spent twenty-six years documenting the inexplicable. She had catalogued cold spots in abandoned asylums, recorded the whispers of the dead in Victorian mansions, and even captured...

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