Ghost stories from Misc

The Last Toll

The service camp in Chandrapur had been a grind of oily engines and haggling farmers, but the promise of a hot meal and a roadside bar in the town of...

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The Devouring Mother

Ever since the old convent on Mill Road was deconsecrated and turned into a museum, I’d felt an odd pull toward it. I’m not religious, never have been, but there...

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The Salt Lines

The first time I noticed the salt lines was on a Tuesday, three weeks after we moved into Uncle Harold’s house on the edge of the salt flats. Aunt Mabel...

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The Static in the Walls

Every apartment in the Meridian Complex had the same beige walls, the same recirculated air, and the same hum from the ancient boiler in the basement. I’d lived there for...

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The Cinder-Witch’s Mark

The summer I turned five, we lived in a house that smelled of boiled cabbage and old plaster. It sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in a town called...

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The Static Between Heartbeats

The first week of winter break, my friend Leo and I were sprawled across his basement floor, our sleeping bags zipped up to our chins against the draft that seeped...

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The Key to Room 14

The summer of 2007 had been a blur of paint fumes and box flaps. We’d poured every dollar into the old Victorian, scraping away decades of grime to reveal the...

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The Weight of Unseen Hands

When I moved into my great-aunt’s old farmhouse on the edge of the cranberry bogs, I thought I was getting a fresh start. The place had been in the family...

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The Aisle of Static

The first time I saw her, I was six, standing in the checkout line at the old Shopwell grocery, the one with the flickering fluorescent lights and the smell of...

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The Latch That Stuck

I’d always been the skeptic in my group of friends, the one who’d roll their eyes at every campfire tale and shrug off every ‘haunted house’ dare. I’d devour ghost...

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The Hollow Wall

I was nine when we moved into the Holloway House, though the name was just a realtor’s trick to make a drafty Victorian sound charming. It sat at the end...

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The Mimic in the Static

The clock on my nightstand glowed 1:47 AM, and as usual, sleep was a distant country I couldn’t find a visa for. I’d been scrolling through playlists, trying to drown...

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The Painted Cracks

After our daughter Maya was born in 2019, my wife Elena and I moved into a first-floor unit in a newly built complex near the bustling intersection of Avenida Central...

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The Fingerprint on the Glass

It was a rainy Tuesday evening when I found myself trapped in the sticky sweetness of my sister’s living room, watching a cartoon about a robot boy with my two...

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The Third-Floor Watcher

I have always been attuned to the strange and unseen. From childhood, I sensed things others dismissed, and by my early thirties, I had accepted that the world was layered...

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The Kitchen Light Dims

Two years ago, my husband Mark and I moved with our two children into a converted apartment building on the outskirts of a small Ohio town. The building had once...

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The Pacing Above

My room is the smaller of the two bedrooms in the old farmhouse, tucked at the end of a narrow hallway. The window faces the overgrown orchard, and on clear...

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The Hanging Garden of Roots

The summer I turned seventeen, my mother finally convinced me to take over my sister’s old room at the end of the hall. It was larger than mine, with a...

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The Hollow Between the Floorboards

The house on Strada Mântuleasa had never felt like mine, even though I’d lived there since Grandpa died and left it to Dad. Built in 1927, it was a hulking...

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The Floor Remembered

I grew up on Cedar Lane, a quiet street that curved at the far end of a town that had once been a cotton plantation. Our house was new, a...

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The Static Between Reels

Mara had always been drawn to forgotten things. Old photographs, faded letters, and the crumbling reels of Super 8 film her grandfather left behind. She spent her evenings in the...

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The Summons of the Checkerboard Floor

My wife, Helen, and I had risen with the pale winter sun to drive to the neighboring town of Bramblewood, a forty-minute journey, to pick up our new kitten, a...

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The Hollow Paintings

I was seven when we moved into the old farmhouse on Marrow Lane, a crooked, two-story structure with peeling white paint and a roof that sagged like a tired spine....

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The Last Cigarette

I’ve always been particular about order—maybe it’s a sickness. So when the off-campus house fell into chaos after the end-of-semester blowout, I was the one who stayed behind with a...

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