Ghost stories from Misc

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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The Shattered Effigy

The summer I turned fourteen, my mother let me have two friends over for a sleepover at our dusty farmhouse in Nebraska, a place where the cornfields stretched like a...

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The Hollow Grove Ritual

I was nine when my stepmother, Clara, dragged me to the Pinewood County Fair’s medieval encampment. My father, a history buff, had joined the Society for Creative Anachronism, and Clara,...

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The Last Index Card

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. Up to that point, my life had been stubbornly ordinary, filled with school, chores, and the quiet comfort of books. I was an...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

We had been walking through the marsh for nearly an hour, the boardwalk creaking beneath our boots like old bones. The air was thick with the smell of rotting vegetation...

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The Last Frame

My grandmother, Elena, died in 1962, when my mother was only six. She has been a quiet, watchful presence in our house ever since, not malevolent, but not exactly warm...

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The Unmarked Path

The festival grounds lay at the edge of a town that had forgotten its own name, a place where the last streetlight flickered like a dying heartbeat. It was the...

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The Seam That Held

On a Tuesday in October 1967, I was in Bloom’s department store, searching for the perfect dress to welcome my husband home from his deployment in the Pacific. The store...

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The Loop of Cedar and Bone

The first time I died, I was three minutes old. The second time, I was three hours old. The nurses said I was a stubborn one, a fighter, but I...

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The Woman on the Old Spur Line

I grew up in a town carved out of the cornfields, where the only thing that cut through the flatness was the old railroad. They tore up the tracks when...

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The Five Nails of Ironwood

I have kept this secret for forty years, not because I fear disbelief, but because the truth is a splinter that works its way deeper the more you touch it....

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The Arrival Through the Frost

It was the winter of my ninth year when I first became aware of the cold. Not the chill of the air, but the cold of an ending. I remember...

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The Weeping Frame

The old generator coughed to life as I pressed the rusted button, and the fluorescent lights of the Crawdad Creek Grocery flickered on, revealing a sparse aisle of dusty canned...

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The Sleepless Wake

The summer heat clung to the cobblestone streets of Thornwick like a fever, and our impromptu trip to the old market town had been a welcome escape from the city’s...

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The Hollow Man in the Hallway

The first time I saw the hollow man, I was seven, standing at the end of the upstairs hallway in our new apartment in the old Thornwood building. He was...

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The Intercom’s Last Ring

In the humid outskirts of Antipolo, I grew up under my grandparents’ stern love in a house that could have been mistaken for a forgotten Spanish garrison. The walls were...

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The Hollow Reel

The sun had begun its slow descent over the cliff-lined coast of Lanzarote, painting the sky in shades of amber and rose. I was twelve that summer, and my parents...

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The Crate of Roots

I was seventeen when the house on Maple Street started feeling wrong. We’d moved there three years earlier, after my father’s transfer to a small Ontario town. It was an...

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The Rafter’s Pulse

I was eight when I first noticed the sound, but I think it had been there long before. It lived in the ceiling of my bedroom, in the far corner...

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The Red Blink

My name is Evelyn, and I’ve always been a skeptic. I attended Sunday mass every week until I was eighteen, but the hymns and the incense never sparked a single...

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The Cedar Draft

The house on Hemlock Lane was a constant in my life, like a low-grade fever that never quite broke. We moved there when I was nine, and by the time...

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The Root Cellar Contract

My grandmother’s farm in the Alberta prairies was a world of golden wheat and endless sky, but my cousins and I were drawn to the one blemish on the land:...

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