Ghost stories from Lights

The Staircase Visitor

When I was twelve, my family and I drove from Ohio to the dusty outskirts of Pecos, Texas, to stay with my great-aunt Ruth, my grandfather, and a gaggle of...

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The Lantern Code

For three weeks after Aunt Helena’s funeral, the lighthouse on the headland stayed dark. That was the first wrong thing. The Coast Guard swore the mechanism was sound, and the...

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The Chartreuse Room

In the autumn of 1982, my family moved into a modest brick house on Maple Street, across from the Whitfields. We were a young couple, new to the neighborhood, and...

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The Station at 3:15

In the quiet, dusty town of Marrow, nothing ever happened after the last train left at 11:47 PM. The station was a relic of a bygone era, its wooden benches...

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The Chlorine Afterglow

That summer, when I was eleven, my family lived in a ground-floor flat on the eastern edge of the city, where the old tram lines ended and the new housing...

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The Viscous Visitor

I moved back into my childhood home in the quiet suburb of Maplewood last month, after my apartment lease ended unexpectedly. The house had always felt a bit off, but...

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The Lantern in the Long Grass

I was sixteen when my cousin Eleanor had her first blood, and my aunt and uncle decided we needed a feast to mark the occasion. They lived in the hill...

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The Lantern Wakes

It was a Tuesday when the red-eye from Reykjavik finally touched down, three hours late. My name is Daniel, and I had been gone for a week on a logistical...

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The Light That Knew My Voice

I was nine, and the world was still small enough to fit inside the walls of our bungalow on Birchwood Lane. The house had a peculiar creak in the hallway...

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The Lantern Code

I never put much stock in the idea that the dead linger. My sister-in-law, Mara, was the spiritual one, and her husband, Tomas, was the skeptic. But the night after...

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The Disk of Midnight

The moon hung low over the small desert town of San Junipero, its pale light casting long, distorted shadows across the dusty streets. In a modest adobe house on the...

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The Light Under the Stairs

In the fall of 2014, I was heavy with my second child, and my partner, Elias, and I had moved into my grandmother’s old duplex on the outskirts of a...

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The Ceiling Watcher

In the autumn of 2011, my wife left for a week-long business trip, leaving me and our two kids, ages six and eight, alone in our new house. We had...

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The Unseen Keeper

In the summer of 2014, my wife’s aunt and uncle left their sprawling estate in the rolling hills of southern Vermont for a month-long tour of Scandinavia. The property, known...

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The Cinder Man

In the autumn of 1984, I was a new student at Thornwood Academy, a boarding school nestled in the hills of western Massachusetts. The main building, Ashford Hall, had been...

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The Serpent’s Lantern

In the summer of 2015, I was a twelve-year-old with a mason jar and a mission. The fireflies had just begun their nightly dance, and I chased them across the...

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The Ash-Throat Motel

My mother had a way of collecting broken things—lamps that buzzed, clocks that ran backward, and now me, at thirty-two, back under her roof after my marriage dissolved. The house...

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The Blue Haze Before Dawn

The afternoon sun slanted through the venetian blinds, painting stripes of gold across the worn linoleum of Uncle Harold’s kitchen. I sat with him there, two days before he passed,...

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The Hollow Gaze of the Lantern Room

The lighthouse on Porphyry Point had been abandoned for decades, its lantern room dark and gutted by storms. I, Elara, had taken the summer job as a caretaker for the...

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The Sallow Wisp

It was the summer I turned fourteen, the one where the heat clung to your skin like a second layer and the air smelled of pine and rot. My cousin...

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The Lantern Maker’s Last Flame

Elara had always seen them, drifting motes of light that danced at the edge of her vision, like fireflies trapped in a forgotten dream. She called them ‘lanterns’—a private name...

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The Bar in the Dark

I must have been eleven or twelve when it happened, though the exact year has blurred with time. It was at my friend Elias’s house, a cramped two-story thing on...

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The Ankle-High Drift

In the autumn of 1987, we were living in a quiet cul-de-sac in a suburb of Bristol, where the houses were all red brick with bay windows. Our living room...

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The Chill at Carrowmore Lane

I never believed in the quiet. When we moved from Ohio to Carrowmore Lane in the autumn of 2018, I thought the silence of the South Carolina countryside would be...

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