Ghost stories from Misc

The Stained Chalkboard

I had flown from my humid bungalow in the Florida Keys to the arid sprawl of Phoenix to visit my brother, Liam. He was working as a night manager at...

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The Tug at the Foot of the Loft

It’s been eight years since that night in the old carriage house, and I still can’t sleep with my feet anywhere near the edge of the bed. I was nineteen,...

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The Beckon of the Hollow Court

On a sweltering July evening in 2001, I was seventeen. My cousin Danny, his friend Marcus, my stepfather Warren, and I decided to try something we had read about on...

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The Hollow Eyes of Margaret

When I was eight, my family moved into my great-aunt’s crumbling Victorian house on the edge of the salt marshes. The house smelled of mothballs and sea brine, and every...

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The Chalk Circle

I started taking an online course in automatic writing last autumn, mostly out of curiosity. My study, a converted attic room, was cluttered with oddities: a wooden desk by the...

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The Rag-and-Bone Man of Redmire Hollow

I grew up on the edge of Redmire Hollow, a place where the map makers gave up and wrote ‘unexplored’ in curly script. The nearest town was a forty-minute drive...

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The Blink That Lasted Too Long

I was scraping burnt cheese off a cast-iron skillet at 3:47 AM when the house made a sound like a held breath. My family slept two floors above, my twin...

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The Cold Draft

The summer I turned sixteen, my parents gave me the old sunroom off the kitchen. It was a narrow, glass-walled box that faced the backyard, and it had been empty...

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The Weave of Midnight

Four years back, in the cramped attic room of my aunt’s farmhouse, I had an experience that still makes my skin crawl. The house was old, with crooked beams and...

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The Cipher of the Repeating Man

Four years ago, when I was eight, my teacher gave us an assignment: to share a scary experience. I had one that never let me go. It started on a...

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The Silent Ride

I live on the outskirts of a small town called Millbrook, where the fields stretch flat and golden under the summer sun, and the nearest neighbor is a good ten-minute...

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The Gap Between the Birches

Before I turned eight, my family lived in a house that clung to the edge of a birch wood. The house next door was a faded blue, and between us...

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The Crofter’s Lullaby

In the autumn of 1987, my parents, Ellen and Marcus, moved into a dilapidated farmhouse on the outskirts of a small village in the Scottish Highlands. The house, known as...

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The Latch That Wouldn’t Hold

As a child, I never understood why my family chose that house on the edge of the marsh. It was a sprawling, crumbling Victorian that had seen better decades, its...

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The Lime-Eyed Stranger

At seventeen, Mara had grown accustomed to the weight of unseen things. Her family called it imagination; her pastor called it a gift. She called it a nuisance. But when...

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The Hungry Pocket

The first thing I noticed was the silence. Not the usual hum of the apartment at night—the fridge kicking in, the faint hiss of the radiator—but a deep, breathing quiet....

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The Static Between Stations

In the autumn of my fourteenth year, my family moved from the crowded city to a town called Grayrock, where the main street had one traffic light and a diner...

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The Charred Stallion

In the autumn of 1963, my great-aunt Celia lived in a sprawling farmhouse on the edge of the Blackwood Forest, with her husband, three sons, and seven daughters. The house...

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The Scorched Orchard

I remember the summer of my ninth year as a blur of golden light and the smell of burnt sugar. My grandmother’s orchard stretched behind our house like a green...

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The Man in the Rain

The first time I saw him, I was eleven, standing at the window of our third-floor apartment, watching the rain streak the glass. He stood under the streetlamp across the...

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The Fourth Floor

It was a Tuesday night when I first noticed something wrong with the bathroom on the fourth floor of the old apartment building I’d just moved into. The building was...

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The Static Between Floors

The morning began like any other in the old apartment on Meridian Street, with the sound of rain tapping the window and the smell of stale coffee from the pot...

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The Basement’s Quiet Tenant

That summer, I spent most of my time at my friend Devon’s place. It was a big old Victorian house on the edge of a town that had seen better...

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The Attic’s Promise

My name is Elias, and I’ve always been drawn to places with history. When I found the old farmhouse on the outskirts of Millbrook, I knew it was the one....

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