Ghost stories from Misc

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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The Man in the Hallway

Mara had always been a light sleeper, but the past few months had turned her nights into a gauntlet of half-waking terrors. It started with the sound of footsteps in...

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The Last Manuscript

I was a graduate student at the Ashford School of Arts, tucked away in the fog-draped hills of coastal Maine. The program was low-residency, so twice a year I’d spend...

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The Photographic Memory

The house on Maple Hollow Road was a mistake from the start. My parents fell in love with its high ceilings and the wraparound porch, but I noticed the way...

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The Jitter of the Chandelier

I never spoke of the chandelier in our new house on Harlow Lane. It was an ugly thing, a sprawling bronze octopus with dusty glass tears that caught the morning...

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The Static Covenant

The rusted trailer sat at the edge of the Crayfield salt flats, a place where the ground shimmered with false water and the air tasted of minerals and decay. I...

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The Hollow Lullaby

The old farmhouse leaned into the prairie wind like an exhausted animal, its bones creaking in a tongue we didn’t understand. Margo and I had moved there with our twin...

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The Cabinet at Cromer Lane

I never believed in the supernatural. Growing up, my father was a scientist, and he taught me that everything has a rational explanation, even if we haven’t found it yet....

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The 6:30 Wake-Up

I was in my apartment, trying to finish the second verse of my latest song. The hum of the city was a distant murmur, and my room was silent save...

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The Rusted Key

In the sweltering summer of 2002, when I was only eight, my family left our cramped apartment in the city for a dilapidated farmhouse on the edge of a dying...

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The Constant Hum

In the summer of 2019, my grandmother, Lola Ising, lay in a room that used to be our laundry room, converted for her failing body. Our house in Pampanga was...

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The Perpetual Chill

The summer I turned thirty, I flew north to escape a heat that felt like a punishment. My friend Mira had recently married a man named Ethan, a widower with...

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The Lantern of Grief

When my wife, Mei, moved from Seoul to the quiet shores of Oahu with her father and sister, it was a fresh start—a chance to leave behind the sorrow of...

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The Glass Harvester

The last day of my vacation in Portugal, my cousin Rui and I took his old fishing boat out past the Algarve cliffs. The sea was a sheet of green...

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The Salt in the Walls

Mara first noticed the new sensitivity three weeks after moving into the old Cormier house. It was a sprawling, saltbox-style structure set back from a gravel road in the rural...

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The Icy Draft from the Loft

After the incident with the hallway closet, I thought I was done with strange drafts. But last autumn, when the leaves had turned brittle and the air smelled of frost,...

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The Attic of Incomplete Marches

I never believed in ghosts until I found the sheet music. That’s ironic, because I’d spent my whole life studying the unseen—not as a believer, but as a skeptic with...

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The Salt Wind and the Spinning Girl

I’m seventeen now, and I still don’t talk about it much. But the wind off the bay always brings it back, that thin, salt-scrubbed air that smells of rotting seaweed...

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The Cup That Rolled

I’m writing this from the small, sunlit room I’ve been assigned at the old convent turned halfway house for single parents. It’s a place of faded grandeur, with high ceilings...

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Hour of the Vessel

For the past month, the alarm clock had been superfluous. I’d jolt awake at exactly 4:47 AM, my heart hammering against my ribs, the primal part of my brain screaming...

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The Lavender Guest

The house on Hemlock Lane was a two-story Victorian that had seen better decades, its wraparound porch sagging like an old woman’s shoulders. My parents rented it for a song,...

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The Salt Marsh Invitation

I have never been one for ghost stories or the supernatural. My name is Dana, and as a child, I was a rationalist before I knew the word, a firm...

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The Kiln of Ash

I never believed in ghosts until I moved into the old pottery studio above the river. The previous owner, a reclusive artist named Janice, had died there, leaving behind her...

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The Poutou Vendor’s Window

In the late autumn of 1974, the coastal town of San Rocco was a place where the sea breeze carried the scent of salt and fried dough. My friends and...

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