Ghost stories from Misc

The Chime in the Attic

The house on Birchwood Lane had been our home for nearly two years, and in that time, I had learned to tolerate its creaks and groans. But some sounds were...

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The Floor Above

At twelve, I moved with my mother into the Sanctuary, a sprawling, whitewashed building that had once been a convent, now converted into a refuge for families. I never believed...

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The Drowned Star of Jezioro Czarne

In the summer I turned fourteen, my family and I traveled to the mountains of southern Poland, to a lake called Jezioro Czarne. My father had been bringing me there...

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The Painted Door of Room 14

I remember the first time I stepped into the old dormitory on the edge of the university campus. It was a red-brick building, crumbling at the corners, with ivy crawling...

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The Lantern’s Last Gasp

I should preface this by saying that my English, while serviceable, is not my first language—I grew up speaking Portuguese in a small coastal town, and even after twenty years...

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The Painted Mourner

In the winter of 1998, my mother, Clara, and my grandmother, Edith, would drive every Tuesday to the Hillcrest Hospice, a low brick building on the outskirts of a town...

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The Salt and the Cicadas

In the summer of 1998, when the heat turned the air thick as syrup and the cicadas screamed from the acacia trees, we owned the nights. Our village, nestled in...

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The Round Window Watcher

It was the summer I turned eleven, and my best friend Maren and I were inseparable. We lived in Miller’s Hollow, a town so small that the only thing to...

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The Ledger in the Wall

In the autumn of that year, the house on Alder Lane began to feel like a living thing with a hunger. My mother, Clara, kept a small leather-bound ledger in...

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The Last Crossing

The winter of ’89 was the coldest I’d ever known, and I was driving home across the salt flats of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. My wife had taken...

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The Green Lettering

The day I started keeping a journal was the day I realized the world had a thin layer of wrongness over it, like a film of oil on water. It...

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The Constant Companion

Ever since I can recall, a lone raven has traced my path through the pre-dawn gloom. Whether I was a child trudging to the village school or now, a man...

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The View From Above

It was a sweltering Tuesday in late July when I woke from a fitful nap, the kind that leaves you heavy-limbed and uncertain of the hour. I was sprawled on...

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The Lantern in the Hall

The storm had been building all evening, a low growl that shook the windows of our cabin. I’d put my three nieces to bed early, tucking them into their sleeping...

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The Ceiling’s Hum

I was seven, in the autumn of 1987, living in a rented house in the town of Millbrook, New York. The house was an old Victorian with a wide wraparound...

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The Perplexing Visit

In the autumn of 1998, when I was barely seven, my family and I traveled to the rural village of Ashford Hollow for a week’s holiday. The village was nestled...

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The Box of Things Left Behind

I never heard the story from my father until I was seventeen, and even then, it came out in fragments, like he was pulling shards of glass from a wound...

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The Silica Slipped

In the autumn of 2016, I was the sole technician at the Highland Croft Museum’s conservation lab, a converted stone barn tucked behind the main building. My job was to...

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The Mirror in Ward 4

I never used to believe in ghosts. I thought they were just stories people told to scare themselves on cold nights. That was before the accident that left me with...

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The Last Candle in the Lantern Room

Before I get to the night that changed everything, you should know a bit about me, so that what follows makes sense. I am a 24-year-old lighthouse keeper on a...

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The Weeping Stone of Kolsai

My name is Aarav, and I am a geologist, not a believer in the supernatural. I have spent my life studying rocks and the stories they tell, but the stones...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Ledger

The house on Lantern Way was a stately Victorian, its gingerbread trim peeling like sunburned skin, its wraparound porch sagging with the weight of a century. I’d moved there with...

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The Gnarled Roots of Grafton Hollow

My grandmother, Elara, had a way of reading the land that bordered on the unnatural. She could tell you where the soil was bitter just by touching it, and she’d...

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The Knocking in the Attic

I’ve always been obsessed with the paranormal. Ever since I was a kid, I devoured every ghost story, every documentary, every grainy YouTube video of supposed spirits. So when my...

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