Ghost stories from Touches

The Staring Boy

I never meant to die that Tuesday. I just wanted the noise to stop—the constant hum of the city, the chatter in my head, the weight of debts I couldn’t...

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When Lila and her partner, Julian, moved into her mother’s old farmhouse, they expected creaking floorboards and drafty windows, not the silent, persistent strangeness that greeted them. The house sat...

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The Lullaby of the Hollow

My earliest memory is not of my mother’s face, but of the cellar door. It was painted a deep, glossy green, the color of beetle wings, and it sat at...

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The Counting Game

My sixteenth birthday was supposed to be a simple sleepover at my Aunt Mabel’s old farmhouse, a place my cousins swore was haunted. My friends – Lena, Priya, Jess, and...

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The Last Comb

I’m a data entry clerk, thirty-two, and I live in a converted lighthouse on a rocky headland that juts into the North Sea. The nearest village is a twenty-minute drive...

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The Glass Garden’s Other Child

Our new house was a marvel of glass and steel, perched on a cliff overlooking the frothing sea. The real estate agent, a nervous woman with darting eyes, had called...

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The Stonemason’s Block

In the autumn of my tenth year, my family moved into a sprawling, drafty house at the edge of a town that seemed to be slowly sinking into the surrounding...

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The Porcelain Keeper

In the dusty attic of the old Calloway house, where the floorboards creaked like tired bones and the air tasted of mothballs and forgotten summers, eleven-year-old Elsie discovered a wooden...

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The Hollow Mannequin

Mara had always been a light sleeper, but the past three nights had been torture. Each night, at precisely 2:00 AM, the grandfather clock in the hall would chime, and...

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The Latchkey Guest

The house at 14 Gable Lane was a hand-me-down, not in the loving sense, but in the way a cemetery plot is handed down. I inherited it from my aunt,...

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The Crouch in the Closet

Our new house sat at the end of a gravel road, its paint peeling like sunburned skin. Mom said it was a fresh start, but the moment we stepped through...

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The Crooked House on Bramble Lane

The cottage on Bramble Lane was a patchwork of mismatched lumber and salvaged windows, leaning slightly as if the earth itself was trying to shrug it off. I’d rented it...

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The Pattern in the Pines

The first time I saw her, I was folding laundry in the living room of our cabin, the one my parents rented in the pines for the summer. The air...

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The Blue Room on Crane Street

Every third weekend, my father and I would drive out to my great-aunt Theodora’s place on Crane Street. I always dreaded those visits. The house was a towering Victorian with...

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The Weight of Stillness

After the collapse of my marriage and the subsequent unraveling of my career, I found myself drifting. My grandmother, a woman of few words but profound kindness, offered me refuge...

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The Grid of Rust and Rain

The apartment on the fourth floor of the old Hollis Building was always cold, even in summer. Rain streaked the windows, and the city’s din was a distant hum. Milo...

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The Thirteen-Pound Bell

I moved to Aberfan, not for the scenery or the quiet, but because the rent was almost nothing. The village clung to the hillside like a barnacle, its rows of...

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The Man in the Mango Grove

I grew up in a creaking farmhouse on the edge of the Blackwood Marsh, where the locals whispered of the Old Ones—spirits of the first people who walked this land...

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The Clockwork Intruder

I live in a converted warehouse in the industrial district of Portland, Oregon, where the fog rolls in off the Willamette River and clings to the old brick like a...

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The Salt Line

The summer my cousin Lena came to stay, the air in the valley felt wrong. Not in a way you could point to, but like the buzz before a storm...

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The Compass and the Cold

The winter after my grandmother passed, I found myself alone in her old farmhouse, sorting through decades of clutter. It was three days after New Year’s, and the snow had...

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The Ceiling Fan’s Shadow

Elise had always found comfort in the hum of the old washing machine in the basement. It was a steady, rhythmic sound that filled the otherwise silent house, a house...

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The Carbon Monoxide Dreams

I never believed in ghosts until my Aunt Clara moved into that house on Bellamy Road. It wasn’t a haunted mansion or an old creaking farmhouse; it was a brand-new...

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The Unseen Listener

Milo had always been a night owl. At twenty-three, living alone in his late grandmother’s creaky Victorian house, he found solace in the quiet hours after midnight. The house was...

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