Ghost stories from Shadow People

The Coil in the Static

It was the summer I turned eight that the house on Marrow Lane decided to show me its teeth. We had moved there in June, a sprawling Victorian with a...

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The Glass Station

The first time I saw the man in the glass, I was eight years old, standing at the window of our apartment in the coastal town of Drayburn. It was...

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The Paper Ghost

It’s strange how you can live in a place for years and never notice the small details until a single event pulls them into sharp focus. For me, that event...

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The Lamp Post’s Guest

My cousin and I were spending the summer at our great-uncle’s farmhouse in the rolling hills of Batangas, far from the buzzing streets of Manila but close enough for the...

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The Hat on the Gable

The autumn air had that crisp, pre-Halloween bite, and we were all crammed into the narrow backyard of Marcus’s house, the fence looming like a picket of ribs against the...

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The Static at the Stove

It started, as these things often do, in the grey hours between sleep and waking. I was renting a small, drafty apartment above a 24-hour laundromat, and the constant hum...

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The Static in the Hall

Maya had always been a light sleeper, a trait she’d inherited from our mother. Our childhood home was full of creaks and groans, and she’d often wake me with whispered...

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The Dropped Shadow

I never thought much about my grandmother’s stories of the old country, of the things that crawled in the walls of her childhood home and the marks they left on...

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The Warden of the Hallway

My grandmother’s house had always felt like a living thing, its walls breathing with the sighs of old wood and its floorboards groaning under the weight of decades. When I...

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The Cesspit of July

The house on Lorong Koo Chuan was a four-room flat that had seen a century of damp and decay. My family had always been porous to the other side, but...

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The Blackout Wraith

It was a humid August night in the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona, 2017. I was recovering from a fractured rib, the result of a mountain biking accident a week earlier....

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The Ledger of Ashes

In the autumn of 1986, my family occupied the top floor of a weathered brownstone in the Ravenswood district of Chicago. The building had once been a grand residence, but...

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The Blackberry Tunnel

In the fall of 1996, I was sixteen, and my best friend, Danny, lived on a dead-end gravel road called Old Mill Lane, just outside of a small town in...

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The Chime in the Wall

In the autumn of 2016, I was living alone in a converted water tower in the hills outside of Weldon. The structure was a cylinder of peeling white paint, its...

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The Persistence of the Salt Air

Mara Chen had spent her entire adult life trying to ignore the sensation of being watched. It started when she was thirteen, a prickling at the back of her neck...

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The Attic Floorboards

In the autumn of 2004, in the quiet town of Ashford, I was twelve and my best friend was eleven. We lived on a street of semi-detached houses, and our...

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The Wall-Dweller

The house on Hemlock Lane was the kind that settled into your bones like a damp chill, a place where the floorboards sang their own creaking lullabies at night. I...

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The Key in the Coal Bin

Marla was sixteen the summer she took the job watching the Pettigrew twins, a pair of seven-year-old terrors named Owen and Lily. Their house sat at the end of a...

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The Hollow Doorway

The memory is a frayed ribbon, tethered to a time when the world was soft-edged and fear was a new language I was just learning to speak. I was six,...

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The Coal-Colored Signal

In the late autumn of 2017, I was eight months pregnant with our first child, and my husband, Marcus, had two sons from his previous marriage. We needed more space,...

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The Lavender Menace

I was eight when the summer camp took us to the old Whitmore Arboretum, a sprawling, overgrown garden on the edge of town. It was a place of dusty paths,...

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The Hollow Between the Beds

It was the summer before my freshman year when my family packed up our small apartment and moved to an old farmhouse at the edge of a town called Cold...

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The Damp Room

The old hospital had been boarded up for years, but we knew a way in through the laundry chute. It was a game we played, Mark, Lena, and I. We’d...

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The Hallway That Swallowed Light

I was six when I learned that some doors open backward. Our house on Maple Street had always felt safe, a two-story colonial with a creaky staircase and a pantry...

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