Ghost stories from Touches

The Lantern of the Hollow

The first time I saw the lantern, I thought it was just a trick of the light, a leftover glimmer from the setting sun caught in the wild tangle of...

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The Mirror Room at Bredsted

The summer I turned seventeen, my parents decided we needed a ‘digital detox’ in the Danish countryside. They’d found a listing for a restored farmhouse near the town of Bredsted,...

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The Creaking Step

The house on Maple Street had always felt like a sanctuary to Lena. It was a modest two-story with a creaky staircase that she’d chalked up to old age, but...

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The Chair on the Landing

The house on Maple Street had always felt alive to Elara, but not in a comforting way. It was a presence, a constant hum beneath the floorboards, a creak in...

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The Hollow Lantern

In the autumn of 2011, I took a job as a night nurse at St. Jude’s Hospice, a crumbling Victorian manor on the edge of the marshlands in Norfolk. The...

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The Hollow Man of Cinder Hills

I knew the moment we turned onto the gravel road that I’d made a mistake coming back. The house sat at the end of a long, unkempt drive, its windows...

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The Hollow Squeal

The Thackeray farm sprawled across the fog-choked flats of the Yakima Valley, a place where the wind never quite stopped moaning through the barbed wire. My uncle Delbert had always...

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The Hum Behind the Static

I live alone in a converted lighthouse on the Oregon coast, a relic from the 1920s that the rental agency had practically begged me to take. The spiral staircase groans...

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The Stain That Breathes

My name is Diego, and I’m sixteen, living in a cramped apartment on the third floor of a four-story walk-up in the old colonial zone of Santo Domingo. The building...

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The Last Streetlight

In the autumn of 2004, I moved into a small rented cottage on the edge of a sprawling, unkempt field, about fifty yards from a lonely stretch of country road....

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The Lantern Code

I’ve always been a rational person, a retired engineer who trusts in mechanics and physics. But what happened in the autumn of 2019 in our newly acquired cottage in the...

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The Pale Hitchhiker on County Road 12

This tale was passed down to me not from my father, but from my grandfather, who was a boy in the autumn of 1932. He had gone with his own...

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The Pen That Wrote Back

The first thing that happened was the pen. I was at the desk in my sister’s room, hunched over a half-finished essay for my summer online course. My sister had...

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The Rotting Gift

The summer I turned seven, we moved from one sagging trailer to another just a stone’s throw away. The old one had a mildewed porch and a furnace that groaned...

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The Midnight Gardener

Marta had always been a light sleeper, but the sound that invaded her nights was anything but a normal disturbance. It was a rhythmic, dull thud—’chunk, chunk’—as if someone were...

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The Green Sentinel

It was the summer before sixth grade when my family moved to the outskirts of Millbrook, a town that hugged the edge of a dense forest. Our new house was...

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The Static in the Attic

It was a Tuesday, just past midnight, and the old farmhouse creaked like a ship at sea. I was in the study, hunched over my laptop, trying to finish a...

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The Cinder Man

The old farmhouse sat on a hill like a squatting toad, its paint peeled and blistered, windows gaping like empty sockets. I moved in after my great-aunt died, thinking I’d...

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The Hand on the Shoulder

The first time it happened, I blamed the bourbon. A long shift at the canning factory, the same metal-on-metal clang that followed me home, the cheap bottle I used to...

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The Silent Jogger

My house on Maple Street was a picture of perfection, with its white picket fence and rose bushes that bloomed in wild pinks and reds. The neighbors called it ‘the...

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The Lantern’s Gaze

My husband, Carl, has always scoffed at the supernatural. ‘No such thing as ghosts,’ he’d say, his tone as solid as the steel he worked with. I never argued, but...

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The Fourth Alarm

The night before my brother Caleb was supposed to leave for his new job up north, my mother had a premonition. She said it was a feeling like cold water...

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The Man in the Static

I’ve always been a light sleeper, but ever since my partner, Alex, started working the night shift at the radio station, I’ve found myself waking at odd hours, usually between...

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The Chain That Snapped

On Saturday, October 3rd, 2009, at around seven in the evening, I sat down to dinner with my family. I was nineteen, and my parents had launched into a detailed...

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