Ghost stories from Misc

The Room with the Open Eyes

My mother and I had moved to a small coastal town in Oregon, into a house that was once a fishing lodge. It was a three-bedroom place with a musty...

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The Stovetop Gaze

It was the summer I turned thirteen, the year my parents sent me and my little sister, Maggie, to stay with our great-aunt Edna in her old farmhouse outside of...

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The Hairpin

I remember that night, the first night it happened, as clearly as the day my grandmother died. It was late autumn, and the wind was howling through the pines that...

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The Luminous Visitor

It was the eleventh of September, but Marta had no memory of the date. She had burrowed into her pillow like a hibernating creature, desperate for sleep before her double...

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The Keeper of the Solar Flare

The day I inherited the observatory, I thought my troubles were over. Nestled on a windswept cliff above a slate-gray sea, the domed building had been my childhood sanctuary, a...

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The Sixth White Ball

I had always dismissed the story of the physics teacher who fell from the old lecture hall as a cautionary tale invented to keep students from messing with the gas...

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The Handprint on the Ceiling

For the past several months, the old house on Maple Street had been a source of unease for me and my parents. We’d moved there for the quiet, but the...

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The Hungry Cellar

The first time I noticed the smell, I blamed the old pipes. A faint, sweet rot, like overripe fruit left to wither in a forgotten bowl. It drifted up from...

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The Cold Collector

The summer that swallowed our town was the hottest on record, a wet blanket of heat that pressed down on everything. My old window unit, a beast that had roared...

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The Gilded Sentinel

A few blocks from my apartment in Chicago, there’s a cathedral that always seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. I had no reason to go inside—my family’s traditions...

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The Ladies’ Room on the Meridian Floor

The chime for the final period had barely faded when the pressure in my bladder became an emergency. I was on the seventh floor of the Merriam Building, the oldest...

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The Oven’s Hunger

It was the smell that first told me something was off. Not the usual mustiness of our 1950s brick bungalow in the quiet outskirts of Thunder Bay, but a faint,...

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The Woman in the Hollow

The house sat at the far end of a gravel road, a two-story farmhouse swallowed by cottonwoods and weeds. I was three, maybe four, when we lived there, and the...

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The Static Between Floors

The first time I heard it, I thought it was the old pipes in the walls. Our apartment building, the Meridian, was built in the 1920s, and every unit had...

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The Saffron Recipe

My parents kept me on a short leash after Camila died. It wasn’t that they said ‘no’ outright, but there was always a reason—a headache, a storm warning, a strange...

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The Bell Tower’s Reel

In the autumn of 1997, I was working the evening shift at a tiny vintage electronics shop called ‘Static & Co.’ tucked in the industrial district of a decaying Midwestern...

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The Gilded Torch

The summer I turned twenty-four, I went to Europe with my two best friends, Clara and Marcus. We had grand plans to see every museum and palace we could afford,...

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The Glass Chime

In the summer of 2004, I finally set foot in my grandmother’s abandoned boarding house in the coastal town of San Vicente, Zambales. It was a sprawling, two-story structure from...

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The Night the Beetles Came

It started with the neighbor’s dog. I was out on the porch of my rented farmhouse, sipping coffee at 2 a.m., the usual insomnia hour. The dog, a mangy mutt...

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The Last Holi

I moved to the city of Hyderabad in the summer of 2004, joining a software firm in the tech hub of HITEC City. I found a compact two-bedroom flat in...

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The Third Tenant

The new apartment complex was called The Meridian, a name that sounded like a promise of clean lines and orderly living. I’d moved there after the studio with Nate became...

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The Poltergeist of Peacock Lane

For as long as I can remember, my family lived in a cramped apartment on the third floor of an old, sprawling mansion on Peacock Lane. The house was a...

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The Petal Ledger

It was the last Friday of the month, and the low clouds hung over the town like a wet blanket. The high school, a squat, two-story concrete block, sat at...

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The Hollow Hall

The night I turned twenty-nine, I learned that some houses keep secrets in their walls. My grandmother’s farmhouse had always felt like a husk, a shell of a place that...

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