Ghost stories from Photographs

The Last Photo

It was a Saturday afternoon in late October when my daughter, Elena, and I arrived at the old municipal field, a sprawling patch of overgrown grass bordered by crumbling stone...

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The Rain in the Glass

The first thing I noticed when we moved into the old farmhouse was the way the rain sounded on the tin roof. It was a comforting patter, a white noise...

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The Draft in the Archives

Marta had always found comfort in the quiet corridors of the Wexler County Historical Society. As the night archivist, her shift began at 10 PM and ended at 6 AM,...

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The Tin Ceiling Room

It was late September, and the oppressive heat of a North Carolina Indian summer clung to the air like a damp shroud. My best friend, Elena, and I were working...

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Our group—my youngest daughter, my eldest daughter, her friend from college, my brother, and I—decided to investigate the old Torrence estate, a crumbling farmhouse that had been abandoned since the...

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The Rotating Stool

My name is Marcus, and I run a modest YouTube channel dedicated to exploring the hidden spectrum of light. My bread and butter was a series of videos titled ‘Lucid...

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The Wainwright House Recordings

In the autumn of 2023, I received a call from a family in a town no one has ever heard of, a place called Ashgrove, nestled in the rolling hills...

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The Fridge Light

Elena first noticed it on a Tuesday. She was unpacking the last of the cardboard boxes in the kitchen of the old farmhouse we’d bought in upstate New York, and...

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The Peppercorn Harvest

Marta and I had been in the old farmhouse for over a decade when the Mother’s Day morning came that changed everything. It was a Friday, May 11, 2012. The...

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The Marrow of the Manor

The day had been ordinary, the kind of flat, grey afternoon that makes old houses seem even older. My parents and I had driven out to Brinklow Manor, a sprawling...

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The Comet’s Veil

On the first Sunday of November, I drove out to my brother’s farmstead in the rolling hills of southern Vermont. He and his wife had recently renovated their colonial-era farmhouse,...

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The Floating Fry Boxes

When I was six and my brother was three, we lived in a cramped mobile home on the edge of a dying town. The walls were thin, the floor sloped,...

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The Static Man

In the autumn of 1989, I moved into a small, drafty apartment above a closed laundromat. The rent was cheap, and the landlord, a taciturn man named Mr. Hollis, warned...

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The Ash Collector

The fire took Elara’s best friend, Mirella, on the night of May 2nd. Along with Mirella, it consumed her mother, her aunt, her boyfriend, and their golden retriever, Sunny. The...

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The Static in the Iris

My mother always said the dead don’t rest easy in this valley. I never believed her, not until I moved into the old farmhouse on Larkspur Lane. The previous owners...

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The Ash Tray and the Open Door

I’ve stayed at my cousin Marta’s farmhouse many times, but nothing prepared me for what happened last autumn. The house was old, with thick stone walls and a heavy oak...

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The Lantern of Old St. Vitus

The return flight from Prague had been uneventful, but as I scrolled through the photos on my camera, a chill crept down my spine. Hundreds of golden orbs floated in...

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The White Veil

In the small town of Ashford, nestled between rolling hills and a dense pine forest, there was a place the locals called the Hollow. It was an old, forgotten cemetery...

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The Saffron Jacket

It was the summer of 2009, and my cousin Celia had just turned nineteen. Her family had rented a rambling, creaking farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields...

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The Banshee’s Cradle

Mara, a 29-year-old mother of four boys, lived in a cramped apartment above a laundromat in the industrial outskirts of Thunder Bay. The building was old, with creaking pipes and...

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The Hollow Cartouche

The desert sun hammered the white limestone cliffs of the West Bank as our group trudged up the ramp toward the Mortuary Temple. It was late October, but the heat...

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The Photo’s Curse

When Delia first saw the picture on her laptop screen, she thought it was a smudge on the lens. A dark blur curling up from the baseboard in the hallway,...

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The Copper Dial

It started as a joke. My friend Maya had downloaded some ghost-hunting app on her phone, and we were bored at her grandmother’s old house in the Mojave Desert. The...

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The Lantern Keeper

In the fall of 2012, I had been documenting strange light anomalies in and around my rural property, a converted schoolhouse on the edge of Blackwood Marsh. My camera had...

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