Ghost stories from Touches

The Hand That Held the Doll

When I was four, in the autumn of 1987, my family lived in a cramped apartment above a laundromat called Suds & Scents. My room was a converted pantry, its...

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A Late Night Visit

I was just reading, ” A sea of voices in the night” by Ant 1111. You know, that story brings back a memory of something that happened when I was...

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The Saltwood Ledger

Between the ages of five and nine, I sometimes felt a cold draft in my bedroom, even with the windows shut and the radiator hissing. A weight would settle at...

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The Third Invitation

Mara lived alone in a studio apartment on the fourth floor of an old building that smelled of dust and slow decay. The unit had one window, facing a brick...

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The Weeping Window

The first time I saw her was through the rain-streaked glass of our attic window, a pale smudge in the gray October light. My grandmother’s old telescope, a relic from...

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The Keeper of the Ledger

I was a night auditor for the Clearwater County Sheriff’s Office, pulling the graveyard shift in a town that rolled up its sidewalks after nine. My name is Deputy Mara...

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The Corner Listener

The move back to Cedar Hill felt like a step backward in time. After five years of Florida’s humidity and citrus, the dry Texas heat and the endless stretch of...

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The Fabric of Empty Rooms

The first time I noticed the threads, I was nine, sitting on the floor of my grandmother’s sewing room, which was really just a cramped nook off the kitchen. The...

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The Sunlit Corridor

The heat that summer was a living thing, coiled in the corridors of the old administrative block at Cordray Field. My office, a narrow room on the second floor, had...

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The Door That Breathed

When we moved to the alpine village of Sankt Erhard, I thought the old farmhouse would be a fresh start. The timber beams creaked like old bones, and the air...

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The Hat Man of Bramblewood Lane

I’ve always been sensitive to the unseen, a gift or a curse depending on the night. My partner, Daniel, is the opposite: a staunch pragmatist who trusts only what his...

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The Folded Linen

I have never been one to believe in the supernatural. In my line of work, I deal with the tangible: broken bones, infections, the slow fade of the elderly. Ghosts...

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The Lantern Keeper

When I was seven, we lived in a crooked farmhouse on the edge of the Thornwood, a forest so dense that sunlight barely touched its floor. My father had inherited...

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The Door That Swung Wide

In the autumn of 2008, my husband and I moved into a converted Victorian mansion on the outskirts of a fading mill town. The house had been a school, then...

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The Yellow Door

I was six when I learned that some doors should never be opened. Our school, a sprawling collection of prefab huts connected by covered walkways, sat on the edge of...

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The Stitch in the Yarn

My fingers moved in the familiar rhythm of the knitting needles, a comforting click-clack that filled the silence of the small apartment. I was finishing the left sleeve of the...

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The Room Behind the Wall

The summer I turned fifteen, my best friend Mira invited me to her family’s estate in the Virginia countryside. The house, once a stagecoach inn, had been in her family...

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The Visitor at the Gilded Lily

My parents had dragged me along on their business trip to the city of Meridian, a place of glass towers and tangled freeways that seemed to swallow the sky. They...

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The Unseen Mourner

It was midsummer when I finally decided to finish clearing out my grandmother’s old house. The place had been locked up since she died, and my mother, stubborn in her...

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The Long Ascent

The last time I saw Elias, he was standing at the foot of my bed, a faint shimmer in the moonlight. That was three weeks ago, and I’ve since learned...

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The Hollow Field

The old farmhouse had a way of holding onto sounds. I’d lie in bed at night, the floorboards groaning like they were remembering footsteps, the wind finding cracks in the...

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The Pane in the Parlor

Two weeks after my father’s funeral, Mom decided we needed a change of scenery. We couldn’t afford a trip abroad, so we accepted Uncle Ray’s invitation to his countryside cottage...

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The Salt in the Wound

A few weeks after moving into my late grandmother’s cottage in the Bavarian Alps, I began to experience a strange recurring dream. I would find myself in a dark, wood-paneled...

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The Last Reflection

I was nine when I discovered that courage is a lie we tell ourselves until the truth finds us. My name is Eli, and I lived in a sprawling, sun-bleached...

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