Ghost stories from Seances

The Third Candle

The night we broke the rules, the house on Hemlock Lane became a mausoleum of memories that didn’t belong to us. My cousin Jenna and her boyfriend Marcus had insisted...

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The Nursery at the Turn

The house on Cedar Lane had a peculiar silence, as if the walls were holding their breath. Eleanor, a young woman with a penchant for the unexplained, had recently moved...

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The Session at Dusk Creek

The delivery van pulled away from the curb, leaving a long cardboard box on the porch. Finn and I had been planning this for weeks—not the box, but what it...

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The Glass Marble Game

I never told anyone the whole story. Not even my wife, and we’ve been married for ten years. But the memory of that summer night in 2008 still claws at...

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The Hollow in the Hill

I never thought I’d tell this story, not even to my bandmates, who’ve heard every weird tour tale I have. But after that night with Marcus, the producer from the...

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The Rafter’s Signature

A few years ago, I stumbled upon an old spirit board at an estate sale, its wood dark with age, the planchette shaped like a teardrop. The date burned into...

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The Hollow Cabinet

It was the summer of 2019, and I was drowning in the kind of boredom that makes you count the cracks in the sidewalk. My friend Maya and I had...

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The Ring of Rust

The apartment sat atop an old cannery, its windows fogged with salt and time. My friend Lena had inherited the place from her grandmother, who had lived there for forty...

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The Worn Grove

I haven’t touched the slate since that night. It’s buried beneath a pile of tax returns and old magazines in the crawlspace under my stairs, wrapped in three layers of...

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The Pencil Trap

It began on a humid August night in the backwoods of Maine, where the air clung to your skin like a wet shroud. My friends—Jenna, Marcus, and I—were the kind...

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The Cardboard Gate

The first time I understood that our family was a beacon for the unseen was the summer we moved to Salt Lake City. I was nine, and my sister Elena...

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The Key in the Lock

I never believed in the lingering past until the day the keys began to turn on their own. Our home, a sprawling Victorian fixer-upper on a quiet cul-de-sac in Maplewood,...

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The Will of the Weeping Tile

It was a sweltering July evening in 2006 when I found myself in my friend Marcus’s basement, the air thick with the smell of damp concrete and old wood. Marcus,...

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The Salt Line

My cousin Dana had always been the cautious one. I was the one who read ghost stories under the covers, but she was the one who checked the locks twice...

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The Sickle and the Salt

It was the last weekend of summer before the harvest fair, and my cousin Delia, who had just turned fourteen, had invited three of her friends to stay at our...

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The Wrong Signal

In the winter of 1978, Margaret and four of her colleagues from the county clerk’s office were pulling an all-nighter to finish filing a backlog of property records. The old...

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The Constant Draft

My name is Elena, and this is my account. It began with a battered cardboard box we found in the attic of our new house, a place we’d rented sight...

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The Cardinal’s Favor

The idea came to me not from a rebellious idol, but from an ancestor—my great-great-grandmother, whose portrait in our inherited farmhouse always seemed to watch me with a knowing glint....

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The Cartographer’s Last Parish

The town of Grayhaven was built on a lie. Not the kind of lie that gets told in courtrooms or over dinner tables, but a lie carved into the very...

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The Cue Ball Rattle

It was the summer after junior year, and Marisol’s birthday party was in full swing at her cousin’s lake house. The place was a sprawling A-frame with a screened-in porch...

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The Unseen Congregation

It began as a dare from a friend who didn’t believe in anything. He left the old wooden board in my apartment, a joke gift from a thrift store, with...

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The Uninvited Round

Three nights ago, my cousin Piper and I unearthed a battered wooden board from the crawlspace beneath Aunt Meg’s old farmhouse. Aunt Meg had always refused to discuss the house’s...

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The Glass Marble Medium

It happened during the autumn I turned fourteen, in the little town of Harrow Creek, where the fog rolled in off the river like a slow tide and the houses...

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The Casket Room

I never believed in the supernatural, not really. But when my best friend, Mara, invited me to spend the weekend at her family’s estate, I couldn’t resist. The place had...

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