Ghost stories from Misc

The Man in the Mirror Tiles

It was the summer of 2011, and my family had taken a cross-country road trip to visit the Grand Canyon. To save money, we stayed at a roadside motel called...

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The Humming Wires

I’d always chalked it up to an overactive imagination, the kind that flares up when you’ve spent too many nights with headphones on, drowning out the hum of an old...

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The Hollow Man on Ward Six

When I was nine, my parents sent me to Camp Kestrel, a place for ‘troubled’ children, nestled in the worn-down hills of the Appalachians. We slept in old Civilian Conservation...

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The Wicker Basket

My grandparents’ house always smelled of mothballs and chamomile, and the floorboards groaned like old bones. They lived just down the lane, past the crooked oak tree, in a cottage...

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The Candle That Knew

My husband and I had been fighting for two hours, our words sharp as broken glass, until finally he muttered something about needing air and stalked off to the living...

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The Thumping in the Floorboards

I was eleven the summer we moved into the old farmhouse on Bitterroot Lane. The place had been abandoned for years, and dust coated the windows like cataracts. My parents...

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The Floating Janitor of Lone Pine Rest Stop

It was the summer of 1987, and my parents, Rachel and Tom, were driving across the country to visit my grandmother in Arizona. They had just passed through the Mojave...

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The Ash-Kicker’s Debt

In the sweltering heat of August, the small town of Kuantan in Malaysia simmered under a blanket of humidity. The air was thick with the scent of burning incense and...

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The Saltwater Static

The ad for the weekend chalet at Pasir Ris promised a seaside escape, a chance to trade the city’s concrete for salt-tinged air. I’d never believed in ghosts, not really....

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The Linen Press

That summer, the heat clung to the red-brick walls of our row house like a second skin, and the air inside tasted of dust and old wood. My mother had...

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The Ceiling Fan’s Complaint

My name is Lena, and I’m thirteen. In the summer of 2018, my parents inherited a house from a distant uncle we barely knew. It was a sprawling, crooked Victorian...

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The Hollow Tread of Mrs. Kettering

I was seventeen when I stayed with the Millers in their sprawling Victorian near the edge of Cold Springs, a town that seemed to hold its breath even in summer....

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The Trackside Sorrow

My name is Arjun Mehta, and I am twenty-two. I’ve always been drawn to the edges of things—the last house on a street, the final bench in a park, the...

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The Vanishing Point

Every summer, my Girl Scout troop traded the suburbs for a patch of wildness that promised badges and bonding. This year, it was the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, a...

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The Frosted Heirloom

Elena had always felt a strange connection to the old house on Kestrel Lane, a Victorian-era building that had been in her family since her great-grandmother. She was born in...

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The Floorboard’s Debt

Elena had always been a light sleeper, attuned to the subtle groans of their century-old farmhouse. The house, nestled in the fading town of Hollow Creek, had a personality of...

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The Persistence of the Unseen

I’ve always been a person who trusts their senses. But there are moments, brief and sharp, that have made me question the very fabric of what I perceive as real....

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The Blue Static

The first thing I noticed was the dog. Mowgli, my shepherd mix, had been sulking at the bedroom door since I got home from the night shift at the data...

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The Last Candle on the Stair

The old house on Hemlock Lane had been in our family for generations, but I never felt at home there. The walls seemed to breathe, and the floors creaked with...

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The Cold That Climbed

On the evening of my twenty-sixth birthday, I was recounting my history of strange occurrences to a circle of friends over cheap wine and dim lamplight. We had gathered in...

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The Room with the Bottles

I never believed in ghosts, not really. Not until we moved into my grandmother’s house after she passed. The house was a sprawling, old Victorian on the edge of a...

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The Room That Counted

My girlfriend at the time, Lila, had inherited her grandmother’s trailer on the outskirts of a dying town in the high desert of Nevada. The place was a relic from...

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The Bone Orchard Gate

I never believed in ghosts, not really. But there are places that feel wrong, not because they are haunted, but because they are teeming with something older, hungrier. Our house...

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The Frequency of Static

The day the cat arrived, it was raining. Not the soft, apologetic drizzle that usually graces the West Coast, but a proper, hard-driving rain that beat against the tin roof...

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