Ghost stories from Misc

The Hollow Under the Floor

I never believed in the supernatural until I spent a weekend at my friend Mara’s farmhouse. It was the summer I turned fourteen, and her family had just moved from...

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The Perfect Fit

I was the only grandchild who made the trek to see Gran, bringing a casserole or a box of her favorite lemon cookies. Her house smelled of mothballs and dried...

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The Tenant of Ulitsa Pushkina

The stale smell of boiled cabbage and cheap tobacco had become the unofficial perfume of my new life. For six weeks, I’d called this Soviet-era box home, a concrete honeycomb...

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The Door That Breathed

I was seven, maybe eight, when the old farmhouse on Cedar Lane became our prison. My parents had rented it for a steal, ignoring the way the siding peeled like...

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The Fiddle Leaf Fig

My daughter, Claire, and her family moved into a sprawling Victorian on Hemlock Lane last autumn. The house was charming, with a wrap-around porch and a turret, but it had...

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The Bone-Tarot of Hollowbrook

At seventeen, I was obsessed with the occult, not as a lark, but as a desperate attempt to understand the suffocating dread that had settled over our house since my...

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The Needle’s Lament

I have always believed that the objects we handle absorb a little of our lives, a stitch of our joy, a patch of our sorrow. That old Singer in my...

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The Porcelain Mirror

I never trusted the bathroom window. It sat high above the toilet, a frosted glass rectangle that seemed to watch me when I showered. The house itself was an old...

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The Coat Hook

It was autumn, the kind of evening where the sky turns the color of bruised plums and the air smells of wet leaves and woodsmoke. I was seven, maybe eight,...

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The Lucent Marrow

The night air in Redhaven had a way of clinging to your skin like wet gauze. I’d moved there for the quiet, for the old brick factory that now housed...

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The Static Watcher

The first time I saw the Static Watcher, I was nine years old, standing in the hallway of my aunt’s old farmhouse. The house had that heavy, dusty smell of...

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The Last Lobster’s Lament

It was a sweltering Tuesday in late July, the kind of evening where the air hangs thick and heavy, and the cicadas drown out the last of the day’s birdsong....

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The Iron Chisel

After the séance at Mira’s house, I thought we’d closed the book on the black glob. But when she asked me to help her cleanse her new apartment, I felt...

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The Mirror in the Kitchen

It was the winter of 2001, and I was seventeen, living with my parents in a cramped two-room flat in the heart of Kolkata. The city was still waking up,...

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The Concrete Circle

Nadia had always been a skeptic, but her best friend Rohan was a true believer in the paranormal. They were both engineering students in the sprawling city of Pune, and...

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The Bone Ash Ledger

After finishing my engineering degree, I landed a job as a junior accountant at a cooperative bank in the city of Kanpur, in the heart of Uttar Pradesh. The city,...

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The Cracking Coil

I was clearing out the overgrown corner of my yard last September, the one behind the old equipment shed my grandfather had built in the sixties. The property backs onto...

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The Crunch at 3 A.M.

In the still, sweltering July of 2017, I lay awake in my attic bedroom, the ceiling fan churning uselessly above me. The heat was a thick, wet blanket, and my...

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The Night Composter

In the autumn of 2014, I moved into a rundown cottage on the edge of Blackwood Fen, a place where the mist never fully lifted and the trees grew in...

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The Glass Crown of Ashenmere

The first time I saw him, I was drowning in a sea of black velvet. The dream began in a forest of twisted birch trees, their bark peeling like old...

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The Vanishing Prescription

My husband, Arthur, had a peculiar habit: he wore his glasses everywhere except at the gaming tables. It was as if the foggy, flickering lights of the Lucky Moose Casino...

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The Lattice of Bone

The fall of that year brought the Havershams to the lot behind ours, a family of three with a moving truck that groaned like a dying beast. They arrived in...

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The Kitchen Light Flickers

The old farmhouse on Maple Hollow Road had been in my family for generations, its white paint peeling like sunburnt skin. I had never believed in the supernatural, not even...

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The Bibbed Visitor

I’ve lived in this house for six years, ever since it was built on the edge of a pine forest. The previous owner, a retired botanist, had it constructed with...

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