Ghost stories from Pets

The Howling Dog

The summer of 1969 wasn’t a very good one for me. I was sixteen and my mother was dying of cancer. I’d known since May that she was terminal, and...

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The Hollow Feast

It was the summer of ’74 when my father, Elias, was fourteen, and the world was all dusty fields and cicada song. We lived in a sagging farmhouse on the...

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The Unseen Gift

In the damp autumn of that year, my Wirehaired Pointer, Bram, a seven-year-old with a coat like rust and eyes like old copper, lost his zeal for the game we...

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The Last Bell at Hollow Creek

The winter had locked the valley in a brittle silence, and my friends—Mara, Devin, Ezra, and I—needed a break from the boredom of our small town. We’d heard the old...

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The Lantern of Hallow Creek

The summer I turned nine, my family moved from the dry heat of Bakersfield to the damp, moss-choked woods of Hallow Creek, Maine. Our new house was a skeletal Victorian,...

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The Closet’s Tenant

When we inherited the old farmhouse from my wife’s aunt, we knew it came with a history. The previous occupants had left behind a sun-bleached toolbox in the shed and...

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The Grout Between the Tiles

Marta lived in a small, sun-bleached apartment in a coastal town where the sea air gnawed at everything metal and left a fine film of salt on the windowsills. Her...

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The Window at Number 12

I spent my childhood on Maple Street, a cul-de-sac of identical brick houses with manicured lawns and the kind of neighbors who left their doors unlocked. Every family had kids,...

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The Cartographer’s Last Trail

The old house on Bramblewick Lane was a museum of other people’s lives, and my mother, Margaret, was its curator. She filled it with things she loved: dusty books, chipped...

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The Sallow Painter

The day we moved into the old farmhouse on Marrow Lane, the sky was the color of a bruise. I was eleven, and my name is Elsie. We’d come from...

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The Pattern in the Ashes

I never believed in the old country tales my grandmother used to mutter over her tea leaves. ‘What dies with love, returns with hunger,’ she’d say, and I’d roll my...

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The Porcelain Visitor

In the autumn of my ninth year, we lived in a sprawling Victorian house at the edge of a town that seemed to forget it existed. The house had an...

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The Last Swing

In the town of Millbrook, there once stood a small white house with a wraparound porch and a backyard that sloped gently toward a creek. That house had been demolished...

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The Hollow Hearth

I remember the summer I turned twelve, when the heat made everything feel slow and sticky. My friend Chloe and I were bored of the same old games, so when...

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The Red Door Remembers

The placement test had gone better than I expected, and the spring sun felt warm on my shoulders as I walked back to the shared house in Portland. I called...

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The Cinder Box

It began with the kitchen clock. A tick that wasn’t ours, a rhythm that didn’t match the steady sweep of the second hand. We’d moved into the old farmhouse three...

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The Last Cart Before the Tide

The marsh at Low Farrow had a way of keeping secrets. When I moved there with my husband, Silas, and our two Shetland ponies, Bramble and Thorn, I thought the...

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The Last Scent of Pine

My childhood home sat at the edge of a pine forest, where the trees whispered secrets to the wind and the ground was soft with years of fallen needles. When...

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The Ninth Day of Rain

The rain had not stopped for nine days. It drummed against the tin roof of our cabin like a patient percussionist, each drop a note in a symphony of monotony....

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The Gatekeeper’s Playdate

It began in the autumn of 2012, when our only companion was a scruffy Border Collie named Milo. Milo had a peculiar habit: every evening, we’d hear him on the...

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The Keeper of the Porch Light

The house at the end of Cypress Lane had always been a quiet fixture in our neighborhood, its white picket fence and sun-faded shutters a familiar sight. The Martins, who...

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The Lantern Man’s Bargain

My name is Elara, and I’m seventeen. In a few weeks, I’ll be eighteen, and I’m writing this because I need to get it out before the anniversary swallows me...

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The Phantom Purr

In the quiet town of Ashwick, my aunt Mildred was known for her two aging cats, Jasper and Mabel. Jasper, a burly ginger tom, had passed away last autumn, and...

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The Pale Passenger of Old Hollow Road

I was eleven the summer we moved to my grandmother’s house in the foothills of the Cascades, a place where the forest pressed close against the roads, and the only...

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