Ghost stories from Sleep Paralysis

The Keeper of the Looms

The incident I’m about to recount isn’t my first brush with the inexplicable, but it’s the one that clings to me like wet wool. It happened at my friend Lena’s...

Read Story →

The Moss That Breathed

The village of Cranwell huddled in a fold of the Pennines, a place where the moors pressed close and the sky seemed perpetually bruised. My name is Elara, and I...

Read Story →

The Frequency of Static Hearts

The cold seeped through the concrete walls of the converted Victorian asylum that served as our barracks, a persistent damp that clung to the bones. January 1976 in the Welsh...

Read Story →

The Weight of the Ceiling

It was the autumn of 2019, and I had just moved into a fourth-floor walk-up in the old part of the city. The building had been a textile factory in...

Read Story →

The Grip of the Unfinished Play

I’ve never been one to dismiss the unseen. As a stage actress, I’ve learned that the most powerful presences are often the ones you can’t see. But what happened three...

Read Story →

The Cold Nail

I never put much stock in the supernatural. I was a man of science, of reason, a firm believer that every mystery had a logical explanation. But that night in...

Read Story →

The Latitude of the Dead

Six months had passed since the incident at the old farmhouse, and I had finally started to sleep through the night. The talisman I’d made—a crude figure of twisted straw...

Read Story →

The Looming Thread

I live in a place called Stillwater, Maine, where the pines press close and the fog rolls in off the river. I’m fifteen, and I’ve always been the kind of...

Read Story →

The Plastic Wall

When we moved into the maplewood townhomes, I thought we had finally found our forever place. The rent was reasonable, the rooms were spacious, and the neighborhood was quiet. There...

Read Story →

The Red Pool’s Wake

The summer I turned twelve, we moved to a house on the edge of a town called Marrow’s End, a place where the sun set behind a skeletal forest and...

Read Story →

The Static Visitor

The first time it happened, I blamed the new sleep aid my doctor had prescribed after my chronic insomnia took a turn for the worse. The little blue pill was...

Read Story →

The Sunroom Visitor

The alarm on Elara’s phone blared at 6:00 AM, jolting her from a restless sleep. Beside her, Rhys stirred, his arm tightening around her swollen belly for a moment before...

Read Story →

The Weight of Stillness

My name is Clara, and I never believed in the old stories about the house on Bramble Lane. It was a narrow, two-story colonial tucked between identical neighbors in a...

Read Story →

The Gardener’s Fingers

My name is Elias, and I’ve always been a light sleeper, a gift from my years as a night watchman at the old Meridian Seed Vault. After I retired, I...

Read Story →

The Last Candle

My grandmother, Elara, always said that our family had a gift, but she never called it that. She called it ‘the seeing,’ and she warned that it came with a...

Read Story →

The Loft Above the Cookie Factory

Marta had lived in the attic flat above the old cookie factory for six years. The building was a relic of a bygone era, its brick walls stained with decades...

Read Story →

The Paralytic Room

It was 9:01 AM when I finally snapped out of it, but the terror had been building since I first tried to move an hour earlier. I live alone in...

Read Story →

The March of the Hollow Pines

Mira had always prided herself on her ability to fall asleep anywhere, but that night, as the wind rattled the windows of her remote cabin in the Whispering Pines Forest,...

Read Story →

The Hangman’s Noose

It was late October when I moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of Crows’ Perch, a name that should have warned me. My great-aunt had left it to...

Read Story →

The Weight of Green Light

The motel room was suffocating, even with the AC wheezing in the corner. Carla had been driving for thirteen hours, fleeing the failed orchard and the man who owned it,...

Read Story →

The Tenant in 2B

The first time I noticed it, I was unpacking a box of kitchen utensils in my new apartment in the old mill town of Ashford. The complex was a row...

Read Story →

The Static That Breathed

Mara never believed in the unseen. She was a creature of logic, a nurse who trusted in vitals and lab results. Even after her grandmother’s death, when the old woman’s...

Read Story →

The Static Choir

It had been two years since I moved into the old Meridian Arms, a faded brick building that had once been a boarding house for railroad workers. My unit was...

Read Story →

The Third Hour

I’d been devouring a series of grimdark fantasy novels, the kind where ancient curses and forgotten gods lurk between the pages. That night, I’d finished the second book and started...

Read Story →