Ghost stories from Misc

The Salt and the Static

In the summer of 2016, the Colby family returned to their two-story farmhouse after a chimney fire had gutted the ground floor. For eight months, they had lived in a...

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The Carpenter’s Ledger

When we first saw the house, it was nothing but a skeleton of pine and concrete, a promise of a fresh start. My husband, Daniel, and I had been looking...

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The Crate in the Cellar

Twenty years had passed since my parents’ divorce, and I had long since moved out, but when my mother fell ill, I returned to the old house in the countryside...

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The Pale Visitor at 3:47

Maya had always known her family was different. Her grandmother could converse with the dead, her older brother could see them, and her mother could command them to leave. But...

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The Hollow Below the Linoleum

The house on Maple Grove Lane had never felt like ours. Built in the early seventies by a man whose name no one remembered, it had a way of pressing...

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The Iron Harvest

I’d read the old field guides, the ones brittle with age, their pages smelling of dust and dried lavender. They said the raven was a messenger, a psychopomp, a guide...

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The Rusted Latch

When my partner Dale and I hit a rough patch, we moved our old travel trailer into my grandparents’ sprawling, overgrown lot. The trailer had been sitting under a tarp...

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The Porcelain Doll in the Attic

My family moved to the quiet town of Ashford when I was six, into a sprawling Victorian house that had stood empty for years. I grew up there, and for...

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The Static Hour

Three years ago, I gave birth to our daughter, Elara. Our late baby shower gift was a fancy baby monitor, the kind with a video screen and a nightlight. We...

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The Last Desk Before the Void

It was the morning of my architecture entrance exam at the Colombo School of Design, held in an old colonial building that had been converted into a temporary examination hall....

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The Snow Walker’s Breath

I’ve spent my whole life in this two-story farmhouse on the edge of the Cranston bog, ever since I was a toddler. My name is Elias, and I’m now twenty-two....

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The Loam Beneath the Linoleum

My name is Elise, and I grew up in a sleepy, rainswept town in the Pacific Northwest called Ponderosa Pines. When I was nine, my parents split, and my dad...

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The Salt Line

I’ve always carried a peculiar sensitivity, a sixth sense that prickles my skin when the world tilts wrong. My name is Elena, and I grew up in a rambling farmhouse...

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The Ledger of Unraveling

I never thought much of the fifth-floor walkup on Meridian Street, with its peeling wallpaper and the perpetual smell of boiled cabbage from Mrs. Kowalski downstairs. But my rent was...

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The Tether of Silk and Static

The summer I turned twelve, my great-aunt from Vancouver sent me a parcel wrapped in brown paper and twine. Inside, nestled in a bed of crumpled tissue, was a doll....

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The Color of Static

The smell of rain-soaked earth and old timber was the first thing I noticed about the farmhouse. It clung to the air like a damp shroud. I’d taken the job...

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The Salt Garden

Before I begin, I want people to know that over the years I have learned to believe that anything is possible. We as a species have it in our nature...

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The Mirror’s Ledger

In the quiet town of Greyhollow, I lived in a house that had always felt too old for its own good. The walls breathed with the memory of past tenants,...

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The Sweaters of November

I never imagined I’d be sorting through my mother’s clothes in the dim light of a basement that smelled of mothballs and old dust. It was a Tuesday in late...

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The Rotating Ledger

I was six when I first saw the sky peel back like a rotten orange. My father had pulled over to adjust the chains on the old pickup, and I...

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The Cold Draft in Apartment 4B

The first time I noticed it, I was alone in my apartment, a modest one-bedroom in the old brick building on Maple Street. It was late autumn, and the radiators...

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The Empty Drawer

The day we cleared out my grandmother’s apartment felt like an autopsy. Not of flesh, but of a life. My mother, Helen, moved with a grim efficiency, her hands trembling...

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The Hollow Door

The cabin sat at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by a forest that seemed to hold its breath after sunset. I had invited three friends for a weekend...

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The Frozen Frame

Elara had always loved the old farmhouse on Meadow Creek Road, but she never expected it to be the backdrop for a nightmare. When her daughter, Lila, turned eight, she...

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