Ghost stories from Touches

The Ventriloquist’s Interval

I’ve always been the skeptic in my group of friends, the one who scoffs at ghost stories and dismisses cold spots as drafts. But my apartment, an old converted textile...

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The Ticking of the Clock

The old farmhouse had always creaked and groaned, but the ticking began after the first frost. It wasn’t a sound I could place—not the pendulum clock in the hall, which...

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The Cellar’s Blue Glow

When I was six, we lived in a long, low ranch house on the edge of a town that seemed to be made of identical buildings. Ours was the third...

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The Empty Chair Agreement

My nights at the Briarwood Manor were usually as predictable as the slow drip of a leaky faucet. But that night, the air felt heavy, charged with an unease that...

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The Drip on the Ceiling

In 2005, my partner, Lena, and I had just moved into a new apartment on the fourth floor of the old Ashford building, a converted warehouse that now housed a...

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The Patchwork Visitor

I was nine when my grandmother died, and that was when the strangeness began. My cousin Maya and I shared the attic bedroom of my aunt’s old farmhouse, a place...

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The Static Between Frequencies

I grew up in a house that hummed. It wasn’t a sound you could hear with your ears so much as a vibration that lived in the floorboards and the...

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The Tenant in Apartment 3B

My second apartment was on the third floor of a converted Victorian house on Marigold Street. The building had a wraparound porch, and the landlady, Mrs. Kowalski, kept potted ferns...

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The Intruder’s Orbit

I was eight when I traded my bed for the pull-out couch in our lakeside cabin, lured by the novelty of sleeping where the TV still glowed with static. The...

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The Veil of the Meadow

In the sleepy town of Ashwick, nestled between rolling hills and a dense cedar forest, sixteen-year-old Mara was walking her neighbor’s Jack Russell, a scrappy little fellow named Pip. The...

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The Static Between Heartbeats

I’d been running on fumes for days, the kind of exhaustion that settles into your bones and makes the world feel like a film reel skipping frames. My job as...

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The Rooted Watcher

The summer I turned fifteen, my family moved into a house that sat at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by a forest that seemed to lean in too...

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The Moonlit Beckoning

It was the summer of my twenty-third year, and I found myself in the remote village of Ashford Fen, a place that seemed to exist outside of time. My great-aunt,...

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The Pale Visitor on Barlow Lane

I’ve always been drawn to old things. At seventeen, I spent more time in the archives of the local library than with people my age, tracing the history of our...

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The Marble Mannequin

The autumn of 2006, I was twelve, and we had just moved into my great-aunt’s old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The house had been empty for years, and...

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The Lantern Man

I was three when we moved into the old quarantine cottages on the northern edge of the pine forest. My mother and stepfather had taken jobs at the sanatorium up...

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The Hollow Crown

I had nailed the stag’s skull above my bed as a trophy, a testament to the year I spent tracking it through the marshlands. Its antlers branched like gnarled fingers,...

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The Wallpaper Bloom

In the spring of 2011, I moved into my grandmother’s old house in a town that time forgot. The house was a cramped Victorian with peeling floral wallpaper and a...

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The Cradle of Ice

My name is Elara. I’m not sure if what happened in our home was a ghost, a spirit, or something else entirely—maybe a crack in the fabric of things, a...

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The Last Tarantella

The summer solstice was a week gone, and the heat had settled into the Arkansas backwoods like a sickness. I was hauling a load of antique furniture from a dead...

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The Blue House on Carcass Road

The house was blue, the kind of blue that doesn’t belong in nature, a shade that seemed to have been scraped from a child’s crayon and smeared across the walls....

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The Weeping Wall

I never spoke about the thinness in our house, the way certain corners seemed to breathe. It wasn’t a gift; it was a curse, a constant low hum of awareness...

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The Catechism of Salt and Ash

It began with a smell—not the usual must of my grandmother’s house, but something deeper, like wet earth and burnt sugar. I had been staying there for a week, helping...

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The Blueprint in the Attic

It started two weeks after we unpacked our boxes in the refurbished paper mill, a sprawling complex that had been converted into a tech incubator. Our startup, a small team...

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