Ghost stories from Shadow People

The Hollow Between Corn Rows

At sixteen, I thought I knew every dark bend of the county roads that snaked between our farmhouse and the Harlow place. It was a two-mile stretch of gravel and...

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Shadow Person Messing With My Wife

Laying awake this morning around 2 am my alarm clock straight out in front of me. I am laying on my left side, and the dog is laying at my...

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The Wall-Watcher

The clinic had a smell I never got used to—a mix of antiseptic and old paper, like the building itself was holding its breath. My name is Elara, and I...

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The Vending Machine’s Toll

The night shift at the Beacon Point Lighthouse had a way of warping time. The hours between midnight and dawn stretched like saltwater taffy, each minute pulling thinner until the...

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The Crooked Bed

It was the summer of 2016 when I moved into my uncle’s old farmhouse in the outskirts of a sleepy town. The house had been in the family for generations,...

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The Hollow Silo

I was eleven the summer the silo went silent. We’d just moved to my grandfather’s farm after he passed, a place of rusted machinery and fields that stretched like gray...

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The Cartographer’s Last Crossing

The rain had been falling for three days straight, turning the streets of Millbrook into slick, black mirrors. I was returning from the Meridian Mall, the only place open past...

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The Cradle of Static

The clock on the nightstand read 2:14 AM when I was ripped from a dreamless sleep by a sound I’d never heard from him before—a low, guttural growl that vibrated...

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The Stairwell Passenger

I was driving home to Pennsylvania from a business trip in late November, and I decided to stop by my ex-wife’s place in the small town of Ashford, Ohio, to...

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The Lamplight’s Shape

It has been three years since I last wrote about the things I saw in the old apartment. I’ve since moved into a small house on the edge of a...

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The Unraveling Tapestry

The old house on Maple Street had a peculiar way of holding onto the afternoon light, filtering it through dusty windows into long, golden rectangles that stretched across the worn...

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The Looming Stitches

I had always been the practical one in my family. While my cousins whispered about ghosts at sleepovers, I was the one reading true-crime books under the covers, fascinated by...

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The Static in the Walls

I never told anyone about the figures at first. They were just smudges at the edge of my vision, dark shapes that lingered in doorways or at the foot of...

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The Blue Hour Visitor

The summer I turned thirty-two, I was six months pregnant with our first child, and we’d moved into a renovated farmhouse on the edge of a small village in the...

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The Borrowed Sky

This happened six years ago, when I was sixteen, in the dusty attic of my aunt’s farmhouse in the middle of a heatwave. I was up there looking for a...

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The Red String Pact

It began, as these things often do, in the liminal space between sleep and waking. I live in a quiet town in the Australian outback, where the red dust stains...

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The Cellar’s Debt

I was born in a house that smelled of wet earth and old wood, nestled in a valley where the sun barely touched the ground. My mother died when I...

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Lena had always considered herself a rational person. She taught biology at the local community college, dissecting frogs and explaining the intricacies of cellular respiration with the same dispassionate ease...

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The Chalk Outline of Sam

I was a junior in college when my sister, a professor at the same university, and I shared a house with two other grad students. We called it the Blue...

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The Figure by the Dresser

The summer I turned thirty, I went to stay with my parents in their old farmhouse, nestled in the hills outside a town called Ashford. They had insisted I come...

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The Weight of Two Minutes

Mara lived in a crumbling apartment complex on the edge of the city, where the streetlights buzzed with a sickly orange glow and the air always smelled of damp concrete....

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The Shape in the Mirror

The first time I saw it, I thought it was a trick of the light. The house on Maple Street was a sprawling Victorian with a wraparound porch and a...

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The Lawn Jockey’s Turn

Mara had always cherished Thursday evenings. While her parents and older brother, Cole, headed to the Rusty Spur, a local dive, for their weekly bluegrass jam, she had the house...

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The Medicine Cabinet

When Lena first stepped into the cramped apartment on Marigold Street, she felt a pressure behind her eyes, like the beginnings of a migraine. The walls were the color of...

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