Ghost stories from Misc

The Painted Door

It was the autumn of my eleventh year, and the halls of Birchwood Middle School always smelled of floor wax and old paper. The bell for morning break had just...

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The Hollow Basin

The house on Larkspur Lane had always felt wrong to Mira, but the worst was the bathroom off her parents’ old bedroom. It was a strange, rounded room with a...

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The Glass and the Warden

The first time Maisie saw the glass, she was five, sitting on the worn linoleum of her grandmother’s kitchen while the kettle hissed its steam into the grey afternoon. Gran—Eileen,...

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The Flicker in Room 14

I was fourteen when we moved into the old Draven House, a rambling Victorian that had been split into three apartments. My mother, my younger brother, and I took the...

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The Blue Light Under the Stairs

I’m thirteen, and my name is Milo. I live in a converted lighthouse with my mother, who is a marine biologist. It’s not as cool as it sounds; the light...

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The Walnut Stool

Elsie, at seventy-four, still woke before dawn to the smell of damp earth and the creak of the old oak floorboards. Her grandmother, Agatha, had raised her in this house,...

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The Second Slip

My twenty-eighth birthday found me in a rented condo on the edge of Lake Serenity, a name that felt like a joke given how the water churned gray beneath an...

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The Clacking CDs

My name is Elara, and I’ve always been a magnet for the inexplicable. Most kids see shadows in the corners of their rooms; I saw shadows that moved with purpose....

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The Hollow Coop

Raymond had always been a dreamer, and his latest dream was to own a poultry farm. He convinced his cautious friend, Daniel, to join him in the venture. They leased...

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The Leaf That Stared Back

The first time I saw it, I thought it was a trick of the light. A swirl of dead leaves, kicked up by a gust of wind, dancing across the...

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The Damp Pillow

In the marrow of that November, I was laid low by a fever that clung to my bones like wet wool. For two days, I shivered and sweated, trapped in...

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The Wooden Teeth of the Third Floor

The Old Mill House had stood for over a century, its red brick darkened by soot and rain, its windows like hollow eyes. My grandmother, Elsie, and my grandfather, Bert,...

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The Twelve Custodians of the Iron Mill

Three years ago, when the world seemed to be collapsing around me, I began seeing them—twelve figures draped in tattered gray cloaks, appearing like echoes of an ancient order rather...

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The Unplugged Chime

Eleanor had always been a creature of habit. Her morning routine was a symphony of precise actions: the soft pad of her feet on the worn oak floor, the click...

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The Paperweight

It began with a promotion, and it ended with a paperweight. I suppose that’s the neatest way to frame it, though ‘neat’ is a word that lost all meaning on...

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The Iron Comforter

My name is Eamon, and I’m a seventeen-year-old living in a cramped flat above my parents’ fish-and-chip shop in the port town of Dunmore East, Ireland. I’d pulled an all-nighter...

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The Clockmaker’s Arithmetic

The house at 13 Meridian Lane had a hum that never quite resolved into a tune, like a radio caught between stations. My name is Anya Voss, and I moved...

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The Silk Ribbon Pact

The heat in Kuala Lumpur was a wet blanket, thick with the smell of durian and diesel. It pressed down on the city, making the air feel heavy in the...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Ledger

I never believed in ghosts, not really. I believed in drafts and creaking floorboards, in the way old houses settle their bones. But when my mother and sister packed us...

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The Constant Hum

When I first laid eyes on the old farmhouse, I felt an inexplicable pull, as if some part of me already belonged there. It wasn’t the kind of love at...

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The Table’s Guests

Growing up in my grandparents’ old farmhouse, I spent many nights on the lumpy pull-out couch in the parlor whenever a fever gripped me. The house was a maze of...

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The Perpetual String

The summer I turned seven, my family moved into the old Hadley place, a sprawling Victorian that had been empty for decades. The previous owners, the Hadleys, had died in...

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The Lamplighter’s Glimpse

At twenty-six, Mara had built her life on the bedrock of reason. She was a lab technician, a woman who trusted in the visible and the measurable. Her childhood home,...

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The Cellar of Static

My name is Lena, and I’m thirty-one now, but the year I turned twenty-six, I learned that the world has teeth. I was a skeptic, the kind who needs to...

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