Ghost stories from Misc

The Parcel of Dust

The morning after we tried to reach the other side, I woke to find the air in my apartment thick with dust. Not the ordinary kind that settles on shelves,...

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The Measure of Stillness

It began with the wallpaper, not the peeling or the floral pattern that looked like a rash, but the way the pattern seemed to move in the corner of my...

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The Brass Bell

The first thing I noticed about the old farmhouse was the brass bell hanging by the front door. It was tarnished, with a crack running down its side, and I...

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The Last Stop Before the Marsh

In late October, my family and I boarded the night train from Chennai to the Nilgiri Hills, hoping to celebrate Diwali with my grandmother in Coonoor. But the journey turned...

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The Cinder Path

In the autumn of my junior year, I found myself in the dusty embrace of the Mojave Desert, working a construction gig with my father to make some quick cash....

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The Cartographer’s Guest

When I inherited my great-uncle’s house in the town of Pemberton, I expected dust and old furniture, not the lingering chill that followed me from room to room. The house...

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The Hollow Between the Stairs

It began on a Tuesday, not with a scream or a cold draft, but with a creak. My name is Elowen, and for the past six months, I’ve been seeing...

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The Painful Weight

At fourteen, I thought I knew fear. Growing up in the narrow, damp streets of Preston, I had heard tales of the old textile mills and the workers who died...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

My grandmother’s farm sat at the edge of the Thornwood, a place where the pines grew so thick they swallowed the daylight. I spent my summers there as a child,...

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The Grey Litany of the Orchard

The first time I saw her after the funeral was not in a dream. It was in the orchard behind our farmhouse, the old McAllen place, where the apple trees...

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The Final Play

I’ve always had a strange relationship with the idea of ghosts. They fascinate me, but they also terrify me in a way that nothing else does. Call it a phobia...

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The Weave of the Empty Loom

In the quiet town of Ashwick, nestled between the fog-choked pines and the restless black waters of Lake Merrow, there stands a house that has been empty for thirty years....

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The Locket of Cedar Hollow

My name is Elara, and I am fourteen. I live with my grandmother in Cedar Hollow, a town that seems to be perpetually draped in mist, nestled in the Appalachian...

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The Magnet Door

I never believed in ghosts, not really. I was sixteen, and my world was made of concrete and streetlights, not specters and whispers. I lived with my mom, my younger...

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The Bench at 4 AM

The first thing that pulled me from sleep was a laugh. Not a full-bodied adult laugh, but a child’s giggle, high and sweet, the kind that usually makes you smile....

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The Catalogue of Unfinished Things

The house on Alderney Lane wasn’t old in the way of castles or cathedrals. It was old in the way of a thing that has been left to settle into...

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The Static Visitor

My first brush with the inexplicable happened when I was nine, in the sweltering summer of 1987, in my grandmother’s farmhouse on the edge of the Nebraska cornfields. It was...

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The Knob That Turned

The first month in the old farmhouse, I chalked it up to new-house jitters. The walls creaked, the wind moaned through the loose window frames, and the barn out back...

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The Fence at Miller’s Field

When I was eight, we lived in a creaking farmhouse on the edge of Miller’s Field, a place where the corn grew so tall it blotted out the sun, and...

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The Unseen Tenant

Maya had always believed that the city was a living organism, its veins pulsing with the hum of traffic and the rustle of leaves in the park. But when she...

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The Hollow Glade

For as long as I can remember, my nights have been punctured by a recurring dream that feels more like a memory I never lived. I am eight years old,...

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The Frequency of the Hungry

Six months after I moved into the old carriage house behind the bakery, I began to notice things. Not the kind of things you can dismiss as drafts or creaking...

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The Hollow Man of Mire Lake

When Elias was eleven, his grandfather took him and his older brother, Marcus, into the Hightower Range, a stretch of tangled forest and sliding shale that locals called the Hungry...

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The Long Fingers of the Monk

I was twelve when I saw them, the long fingers, reaching out from the wall. It happened in my great-aunt Elspeth’s cottage in the Highlands, a squat stone building that...

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