Ghost stories from Lights

The Amber Streetlight

The night air was thick with the scent of pine and damp earth, a typical autumn evening in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where I lived with my...

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The Mannequin in the Rain

I had been living in the converted lighthouse for three years, ever since I inherited it from an uncle I barely knew. It stood on a rocky outcrop, isolated from...

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The Lantern in the Walls

I never believed in the stories my grandmother told me about the things that lived in the dark spaces of the world. She spoke of the ‘Lantern Bearers,’ creatures that...

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The Lantern in the Orchard

It was the summer of ’97 when our family moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the Harlow Woods. My parents had bought the property the previous autumn,...

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The Copper Kettle’s Toll

I’d always prided myself on being a rational man. Ghosts, spirits, the paranormal—all of it was fodder for late-night television, not for a civil engineer with a steady job and...

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The Constant Pinch

When the pinching started, I assumed it was a laundry tag or an allergic reaction to the new detergent. But it wasn’t long before I felt the sensation on bare...

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The Last Passenger of Car 7

I never expected to see him again, not after the way he vanished last winter. My name is Elias, and I’ve spent the past three years as the night caretaker...

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The Glassblower’s Reckoning

The summer I turned nine, my parents dragged me to the foothills of the Umbrian mountains to visit my great-aunt Rosalba. She was a recluse who lived in a crumbling...

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The Sunken Path

In the damp hollows of Cranston, Maine, where the old logging trails snake through the pines, things have a way of untying themselves from the land. The locals know to...

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The Lantern Bloom

The summer I turned seven, my parents hauled me to a lake resort in the middle of nowhere, a place called Stillwater Pines. The air smelled of pine needles and...

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The Lantern That Wasn’t

On the evening of October 14th, 2011, I was in the study of my old lakeside cottage, typing a letter to my sister on a vintage typewriter that hummed with...

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The Glow in the Pinewood

It happened to my buddy Marcus, three decades ago, when he was just a scrawny twelve-year-old, spending weekends at his family’s cabin on Trillium Lake. Trillium was a sleepy town...

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The Static Between Us

Mara lived in a house that hummed. It wasn’t the pipes, or the old wiring, or the neighbor’s generator—it was a low, electric thrum that vibrated just beneath the threshold...

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The Flickering Circuit

I never believed in the supernatural, not really. I was a man of science, a technician who could trace a faulty wire or a failing capacitor in seconds. But three...

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The Nailed Windows

I was twenty-one when I played bass for a small bluegrass gospel band called the Hollow Creek Singers. We weren’t famous, not even close, but we had a following in...

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The Flicker Code

I’ve been the night clerk at the Saltmarsh Motor Lodge for nearly eight months now, and in that time I’ve learned to accept the peculiar rhythms of a place that...

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The Luminal Intruder

In the silent depths of that night, I lay in my rented room on the third floor of an old, creaking house on Wharf Street, a place that smelled of...

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The Umbra of the Hanging Nest

The summer I turned ten, I was sent to my great-aunt’s farmhouse, a rambling Victorian relic swallowed by sunflower fields and whispering grass. My parents, amid a tense divorce, needed...

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The Pale Aurora

I’ve lived in this old farmhouse for years, forty miles from the nearest town, and I’ve seen my share of strange weather. But nothing prepared me for what happened on...

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The Cyan Bauble

My name is Adrian, and I’ve always prided myself on being a rational man. I don’t scare easily, and I certainly don’t believe in the supernatural. But what I witnessed...

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The Lantern in the Pines

On the last night of December, when the air bit with frost and the sky hung like a shroud, I was nine, bundled in flannel, staring out the attic window...

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The Hollow Man of Rainy Hollow

It was the summer I turned twelve, the summer we moved to my grandmother’s old farmhouse in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. The nearest town was a twenty-minute drive,...

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The Lantern in the Larches

The October wind carried the scent of damp earth and pine as Mira and I climbed the hill behind St. Aldwyn’s Academy. The school’s gothic spires were swallowed by the...

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The Beacon on Ashford Lane

I was never one to believe in the things that go bump in the night. Not really. I’d read the books, watched the shows, but they were just stories. My...

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