Ghost stories from Lights

The Lantern of the Sallow Field

I have kept this to myself for eleven years, not out of fear of disbelief, but because the telling of it feels like peeling back a scar that has healed...

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The Looming Halo

The first time I saw them, I was five, staring at the cracked plaster of my ceiling. Three shapes, like elongated triangles with rounded bases, would drift around the bulb...

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The Static in the Wiring

The house on Mulberry Lane was a squat, whitewashed bungalow with a sun-bleached picket fence and a garden that wilted under the weight of a humid summer. We’d moved there...

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The Ashen Companion

The first time I saw it, I blamed the dust in the old archives. I had been cataloguing brittle newspapers for the Maritime Historical Society, and the basement air was...

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The Syrup Light

That night in late October of 2007, I was driving home from my third-shift janitorial job at the old Meridian Textile Mill, which had been shut down for years but...

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The Candied Static

Mara had been collecting artifacts of the unseen for years. Her phone’s camera roll was a graveyard of light: glowing spheres hovering over her grandmother’s rose garden, translucent orbs drifting...

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The Lens of the Lamp

Maya had always loathed bright light. It wasn’t just a preference; it was a physiological betrayal. A camera flash turned her world into a watery blur, a bare bulb overhead...

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The Amber Disc

My final semester at Hollowbrook University was a blur of sleepless nights and half-finished essays. I’d been dating Elias for almost a year by then, and we’d fallen into a...

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The Static in the Walls

The weekend had been a blur of neon lights and bass that vibrated in my chest long after the music stopped. I’d crashed at my friend Mira’s place, a cramped...

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The Blue Afternoon

In the summer of 1982, I was twelve years old, sitting on the cracked concrete steps of our trailer porch in the dusty town of Pahrump, Nevada. The air was...

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The Lantern Code

The first time Cora saw them, she was seven, sitting on the cracked linoleum floor of her grandmother’s kitchen while a pot of chillis simmered on the stove. A tiny,...

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The Laminated Hymn

The sanctuary of the First United Methodist Church in Hebbronville, Texas, had a peculiar smell that Sunday morning: a mix of old hymnals, lemon polish, and the faint, sweet odor...

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The Cinder in the Wall

The house at 14 Thornwood Lane had always felt like it was breathing. Not in a comforting, living way, but like something trapped behind the plaster, pressing outward. I was...

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The Probability of Spores

I first noticed them during a summer thunderstorm in 1994, perched on the edge of the greenhouse where I worked after school. A flicker of gold, no bigger than a...

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The Exhale

I’m writing this in case someone out there has seen it too. I’m a pediatric nurse, and I’ve worked in hospitals for over a decade. Death is a constant in...

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The Lantern in the Frost

In the low hills beyond the last paved road, where the birch trees grow crooked and the wind sounds like a woman humming, there is a spring that never freezes....

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The Last Cold Sunday

The gravel road unraveled like a frayed nerve through the brush, and Elian kept his eyes fixed on the rearview mirror, watching the dust plume swallow the town of Kittery...

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The Constant Companions

For as long as I can remember, I have seen them—small, pale orbs, like drops of cream suspended in the air. They appear in my house, in the homes of...

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The Last Tollbooth

The sun had bled out over the horizon an hour ago, leaving the sky a bruised purple. I was at the wheel of a rented Peugeot, my brother Tomas asleep...

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The Lantern Man’s Signal

In the quiet outskirts of Fairview, where the old mill’s rusted wheel still creaked in the wind, my partner, Mira, and I rented a basement apartment in a house that...

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The Marigold Halo

The summer I turned thirty, I moved into my great-aunt’s house in the hills of Vermont, a place she’d left to me in her will. It was a cramped, dusty...

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The Static in the Corners

The first time I noticed them, I was nineteen, working the night shift at a dusty gas station off Route 9. A flicker of movement in the corner of my...

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The Silhouette Between the Cupboard and the Stove

When I was five, my parents would leave me with my older brother, Marcus, who was sixteen and had a rotating cast of friends—punk, brain, jock, and a few troublemakers....

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The Brass Bell

The house on Cedar Lane had always felt like a held breath. Its weathered siding was the color of old bone, and its gabled roof hunched over the yard like...

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