Ghost stories from Medium

The Tenant in 3B

In my early twenties, I considered myself a guardian against the unseen. I’d spent years studying theology and the occult, and I’d faced down more than a few unsettling phenomena....

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The Hollow Feast

The autumn that Mara moved in, our white farmhouse on the edge of Cinder Hollow seemed to hold its breath. The maple leaves had turned a bruised red, and the...

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The Luminous Arrival

My earliest conviction that the world held more than what met the eye didn’t come from campfire tales or dusty books; it came from the kitchen window of our farmhouse...

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The Unfinished Game

I’m Milo, and I’ve been seeing the dead since I was six. Over the years, their cold whispers and hollow eyes became as familiar as the creak of my grandmother’s...

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The Rhythm of the Rotting Floorboards

I’m writing this from a rented cabin in the Appalachian foothills, a place I chose for its isolation and its lack of internet. I needed quiet to finally write it...

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The Blue Lamp in the Window

I’d spent my whole life on Fernwood Row. Thirty-two years, to be exact, first in my parents’ two-story brick house, then, after my son Theo was born, across the street...

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The Train Whistle in the Pines

My name is Elara, and I grew up in a house that seemed to breathe. It was a crooked, two-story farmhouse at the edge of Morrow County, surrounded by a...

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Clara’s nights were not her own. Since childhood, she’d been visited by fragmented visions—glimpses of places she’d never been, faces she’d never known. They were like half-remembered songs, discordant and...

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The Grammar of Static

I’m seventeen, and I’ve lived in the same dusty, sun-bleached town in Arizona for my whole life. It’s the kind of place where the heat warps the air and the...

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The Last Keeper

My friend Elena always had a way with the quiet things. She could walk into a room and feel the residue of joy or sorrow left behind by its previous...

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The Tally Keeper’s Ledger

I never knew silence could be so loud. Most people think of silence as a gentle absence, but in my world, it’s the hum of a room full of unseen...

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The Hairline Fracture

The first time I saw the woman in the stairwell, she was a smear of static, like a television channel that didn’t exist. I was seventeen, working the evening shift...

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The Girl in the Shadows

From a young age, I sensed her presence. A girl with dark hair and a Encountershievous smile would appear when I least expected it. Some days she played games with...

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The Lullaby of Hollow Creek

My earliest memories are of the man in the rain. Not a real man, but a shadow that dripped with water, standing at the foot of my bed. He would...

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The Dream Visitor and the Storm

I have always sensed things that others miss. My partner thinks I have a special awareness, and perhaps he is right. Just a few nights ago, I dreamed of my...

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The Glassblower’s Cradle

Elara had always been attuned to the thin places in the world, the seams where the living and the dead might brush against each other. Her grandmother, Ingrid, had called...

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The Stillborn Light

I’m Mara, and before I tell you what happened last autumn, you should understand that the women in my family have always carried a peculiar burden. My great-grandmother, my grandmother,...

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The Atherton Oaks Vigil

I was sixteen when I went to stay at my grandmother’s house in the rural town of Atherton Oaks, a place where the roads are lined with gnarled oaks and...

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The Frequency

My name is Elias Vance, and for five years, between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-seven, I was a walking antenna for the damned. It started on a Tuesday, in...

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The Signal in the Crowd

From my twenty-first year until my twenty-sixth, a strange awareness grew within me. I could be anywhere—a park, a market, a train station—and a sudden feeling would arrive. It was...

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The Red Weeping

My friend Elara told me a story I wasn’t supposed to repeat. She’s always been a bit strange, with her wild hair and eyes that seem to see things that...

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The Unwanted Inheritance

My friend confided in me about her situation, swearing me to secrecy, but I feel I must share it out of concern. She lives with her grandmother, who insists that...

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The Locked Attic Door

I’m Aurora, and I share this account with my older brother, Julian. We’ve had our share of unexplained events, but the one that still gnaws at me happened in the...

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The Cold Draft at Junction 12

Elara had always been the kind of person who filled a room with laughter, the one friends called to lift their spirits. But lately, the laughter had become a hollow...

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