Ghost stories from Misc

The Amber Visitor

I never believed in the stories the old-timers told about Maple Hollow. They spoke of lights in the woods, of things that didn’t belong. I figured they were just trying...

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The Drowned Cartographer’s Ledger

The dreams began in the autumn of 2014, when I was still a ghost drifting through my own life. I’d wake gasping, the phantom chill of deep water clinging to...

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The Blue Moth Appointment

The morning was ordinary, draped in the gray flannel of a sky too tired to decide. My neighbor, Mrs. Elara Voss, had a doctor’s appointment across town in the district...

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The Man in the Work Clothes

The new apartment was a fresh start, or so I told myself. It was a modest two-bedroom on the fourth floor of a pre-war building in the financial district, a...

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The Bone Whistle

Marta had been waiting for the city bus for twenty minutes, her cat, Boris, yowling in the carrier at her feet. The vet appointment was at nine, and the bus,...

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The Hollow Gaze

The night my world tilted, I was in the kitchen, nursing a cup of cold coffee, when the dog—a mutt named Biscuit—began to growl low in her throat. Her hackles...

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The Fourth Tenant

Mara’s earliest memory was not of a lullaby or a warm embrace, but of the cold linoleum floor in the hallway of apartment 4B. She was six, and her brother,...

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The Petal-Faced Man

Maya never noticed the exact moment the streetlights changed from a warm sodium glow to a cold, antiseptic white. She’d been on the phone with her cousin, arguing about whether...

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The Fever Locks

The summer I turned twelve, my grandmother, Nana Rose, finally told me the story of her hair. We sat on the porch of her small, white house in upstate New...

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The Static Between Us

When I first moved to the small town of Clearwater, I thought the library would be my sanctuary. I didn’t have a computer at home, and the library’s quiet, dusty...

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The Man with the November Eyes

In the sweltering summer of 2019, I buried my father on a Tuesday. The heat was unnatural, a suffocating blanket that pressed down on the town of Redwood Creek, a...

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The Offering Plate

I’ve kept this to myself for nearly a decade, but after reading similar accounts, I feel compelled to share. My name is Margaret, and this happened in March 2015, in...

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The Drowsy Page

I was eight when the malaise took hold, or perhaps nine—memory is a fog around those days. We lived in a rented cottage on the edge of the Paskagama bog,...

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The Ring in the Hallway

In the autumn of 2011, my partner, Darian, and I finally signed the lease on our first apartment together, a modest two-bedroom on the fourth floor of an old building...

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The Brass Visitor

In the autumn of 2016, I moved into an old farmhouse on the outskirts of a town that had seen better days. The house was a skeletal structure, its bones...

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The Crossing Keeper

The school was a low, sprawling brick building, set back from a four-lane highway that hummed with relentless traffic. My son, Daniel, has a rare developmental condition that makes the...

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The Fiddle at 2:30

I’d been house-sitting for my aunt in her old farmhouse out in the middle of nowhere, a two-hour drive from the nearest town. With my broken leg from a cycling...

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The Mannequin’s Greeting

It started with a lie, or perhaps a truth I wasn’t ready to accept. My grandmother’s death had pulled me away from the city, and when I returned after a...

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The Stillness of the Glass

The summer I turned twelve, my parents sent me to a creaking, sun-bleached boarding school in the dry hills of New Mexico called St. Elian’s. It was a place of...

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The Hollow Playdate

The summer sun had barely set when I first noticed the change in my son, Leo. He had always been a bright, boisterous boy, but since the arrival of the...

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The Layer of Dust

Elara and I moved into the old Harlow building six months ago. The landlord, a gruff man with a key ring the size of a melon, mentioned that the previous...

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The Keeper of the Root Cellar

It began with a move to an isolated island off the coast of Maine, a place called Cradle Rock, where the fog rolled in like a grey tide and the...

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The Pico de Gallo Summer

In the summer of 2019, I lived in a quiet cul-de-sac in the outskirts of Flagstaff, Arizona. My family had moved there the previous year, seeking a slower pace away...

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The Weeping Ceiling

It was the summer of my eighth year when my parents left me with Aunt Marlene and Uncle Gustav in their crumbling Victorian house in the damp town of Hollow...

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