Ghost stories from Psychic

The Salt-Scarred Hours

Elias Crane had been the head groundskeeper at the Meridian Sea Observatory for eleven years. Perched on a cliff above the Atlantic, the observatory was a relic of the Cold...

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The Last Bus to Bhusawal

The dream was still wet on my skin when I woke, my throat raw from a scream I couldn’t remember. It was 8 a.m. on a Tuesday in March, the...

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The Clockmaker’s Gift

I first noticed the wrongness in the summer I turned nine, when we moved into Gran’s house after she passed. The house was a creaking Victorian on the edge of...

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The Fabric of Memory

I am 34 now, and I have seen things since I was nine, though I only understood what they were much later. My grandmother used to tell me that as...

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The Stitch in the Wall

The old farmhouse had a way of holding its breath. I’d moved there after my divorce, seeking the kind of silence that only a hundred acres of dead cornfields could...

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The Linoleum Ward

I’ve always been too aware of the spaces between things—the gap between sleep and waking, the silence after a door closes, the weight of a room that’s been empty too...

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The Static in the Grain

The first time I tried to write about Petey, the words turned to static on the page. I blamed my ancient laptop, then the flickering tablet, then my own failing...

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The Five Fifty-Five Signal

Granite Peak General Hospital was a brutalist monument of concrete and glass, its corridors smelling of antiseptic and despair. My stepfather, Arthur, had been admitted for a routine bypass, but...

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The Rusty Bell

I never put much stock in dreams, but mine have a way of bleeding into the waking world with unsettling precision. That’s why I knew something was wrong when I...

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The Ledger of Leaving

I had never stepped into the Coldwater Municipal Building before, but when my partner Jules asked me to come along for the service of her great-uncle, I said yes without...

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The Copper Coin Cartel

The first time I saw the pennies bleed, I was eight years old, standing in the dusty aisle of the Quik-Pik convenience store on the edge of town. My mother...

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The Ledger of Room 4

I never believed in ghosts. Not until the night I spent in the old Nilgiri Lodge, a crumbling relic of the British Raj perched on the outskirts of Dehradun. I...

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The Last Ticket

I was twenty-six when the dreams started. They came without warning, always the same ritual: a blood relative, alive and breathing in my waking life, would appear before me in...

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The Janitor’s Cadence

In 1994, I was twenty-two, a restless art school dropout who’d traded paintbrushes for a mop at a private girls’ academy in the leafy hills of Wellington, New Zealand. The...

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The Violet Room

I was seventeen when I learned that some doors should never be opened, even in dreams. That summer, my family rented a cramped cabin in the backwoods of Maine, far...

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The Gatekeeper’s Garden

We signed the lease on the old farmhouse in October of 2018, but the walkthrough was in September. The house itself, a rambling white clapboard with a wraparound porch, sat...

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The Ashen Morning

I was 19 and working the early shift at a diner on the outskirts of a small town called Millbrook. The town was nestled in a valley, surrounded by endless...

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The Crimson Shift

In the winter of 2003, I was a barista at ‘The Grindstone,’ a coffee shop nestled in the historic district of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The city was blanketed in snow,...

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The Fabric of Longing

For years, a weight has settled on my chest at the oddest hours, not heavy but hollow, like a room emptied of its furniture. It started in the autumn I...

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The Cartographer’s Nightmare

When I was eight, my great-aunt Edna, a woman with eyes like polished river stones, took my mother aside at a family reunion. I didn’t hear the words, but I...

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The 3:47 Agreement

The night of October 18th, the rain came down in sheets, drumming against the tin roof of our old farmhouse like a frantic heartbeat. We had visitors—my brother’s in-laws, the...

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The Saltgrass Sentinel

I’ve always considered myself a rational man, but after that autumn, I started to see signs everywhere. I worked as a night security guard at the old Saltgrass Mill, a...

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The Carousel of Unfinished Things

It began on a Greyhound bus slicing through the Nevada desert, the kind of trip where the landscape blurs into a monotone of sand and scrub. I was dozing against...

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The Moth-Glass Orchard

At twenty-three, I’ve learned to live with the unease that settles in my chest when I catch a glimpse of something small and winged lying still on a windowsill. But...

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