Ghost stories from Misc

The Light in the Loft

My name is Eleanor, and for thirty-seven years I taught literature to teenagers who mostly didn’t care. Now I spend my days tending to my garden and my nights with...

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The Key to Room Eleven

Marta and I were house-sitting for her aunt, a retired archaeologist who had gone to Crete for a month. The cottage was a cramped, old place on the edge of...

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The Caravan’s Second Guest

My mother, my little brother Theo, and I arrived at Aunt Miriam’s farmhouse on a sweltering July afternoon. The house was a rambling Victorian relic, all creaking floorboards and dark...

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The Ceiling’s Promise

Mira had never believed in the old house’s stories. The creaking floorboards, the drafty corners, the way the wallpaper peeled like dead skin—it was all just age, she told herself....

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The Iron Gate and the Keeper

Every Día de los Muertos, my grandmother and I would drive from our small town in the high desert of New Mexico to the old Catholic cemetery on the outskirts...

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The Lantern Without a Flame

In the autumn of that year, I drove north to visit my old friend Marta in the small town of Ashfall, nestled in the foothills of the Cascades. On Saturday...

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The Locked Chalkboard

It was a Tuesday afternoon, and the late monsoon rain hammered against the windows of St. Agnes Hall, an exclusive girls’ school tucked into the hills of Baguio. My name...

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The Ticking Heart

The summer I turned thirteen, my family moved from our cramped city apartment to a sprawling Victorian house in the countryside, inherited from a great-aunt I’d never met. The house...

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The Long Face in the Glass

The car crunched over the gravel driveway of my grandparents’ farmhouse, and I watched the taillights vanish down the dirt road, leaving us in the deep country silence. My mom...

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The Tremor in Room 12

The old coast hotel had been in our family for three generations, but it had never felt as oppressive as it did that October weekend. My stepbrother, Jake, and my...

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The Caged Room

I’m not the kind of person who jumps at shadows. Growing up in Perth, I’d heard every ghost story my mates could muster, and none of them ever kept me...

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The Lantern Room’s Guest

In the autumn of 1999, our family moved into the old Harbinger House, perched on a cliff overlooking the gray North Sea. The village below, Saltwick, was a place where...

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The Winged Stain

The summer I turned sixteen, my father moved us to a rented farmhouse in the dusty outskirts of Marfa, Texas. The house was a relic of the 1920s, with creaking...

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The Hollow Tractor

My first months with Lena were spent in her brother-in-law’s house, perched on a hill in the older part of town, where the newer developments gave way to a dense,...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

The lighthouse at Cape Morrow had been abandoned for nearly a century, but the light still burned on certain nights. I was the new caretaker, hired to maintain the property...

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The Bone Bridge

The old maps call the island Isla de los Huesos, but no one uses that name anymore. We know it as Carcass Cay, a scrap of mangrove and limestone off...

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The Last Call at the Rusty Nail

I’d been tending bar at the Rusty Nail for almost two years, and I’d learned the boss’s golden rule the hard way: never refuse a drink. It was a small,...

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The Iron Staircase

The house on Thornwood Lane had a staircase that didn’t belong. It was wrought iron, black as tar, and it descended from the kitchen into a rectangle of darkness that...

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The Frosted Door

In the newly built apartment complex of Ashford Heights, the Winters family—Maya, her younger brother Theo, and their parents—moved into Unit 4B, the first tenants in its pristine walls. The...

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The Hollow Lane

It was a Tuesday in late October, 1994, and I was driving back to my apartment in the outskirts of Bloomington, Indiana, after a late shift at the campus library....

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The Ceiling’s Arithmetic

My cousin Lena and I were sprawled on the floor of my new apartment, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes and the smell of old wood. It was the top floor of...

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The Door That Wasn’t

Mara had always been a vivid dreamer, but the night she dreamed of the house on Larkspur Lane, she knew something was wrong. It was her grandmother’s house, but the...

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The Mound in the Pines

The house sat at the edge of a forest that had been there longer than anyone could remember. Built five years ago, it was a modern structure of glass and...

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The Fifth Period Bell

The bell rang, a shrill mechanical clatter that signaled the end of the last period. Mr. Endicott’s voice droned on about the symbolism in ‘The Scarlet Letter’, but no one...

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