Ghost stories from Touches

The Lantern of Needles

The summer I turned twenty-three, I returned to my grandmother’s village in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, to help care for her while my parents were away. It was 1987,...

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The Leaf-Fall Watcher

In the late summer of 2005, I was sitting on the old, weathered trampoline in my friend Maya’s backyard. Her cousin Rachel had come to stay for the week, and...

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The Grudge of Hollow Creek

Six months after I inherited my grandfather’s farm, the grain silo’s rusted door began to swing open and shut with a rhythmic, defiant clang. The nearest neighbor was a mile...

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The Man Who Fixed the Fence

I never liked the house on Cinder Lane. It wasn’t just the peeling paint or the porch that sagged like a tired spine; it was the way the air thickened...

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The Hollow Comfort

The first time I felt her, I thought the old farmhouse was just playing tricks on me. A draft from the cracked window, a shift in the floorboards. But the...

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The Perpetual Draft

In the late autumn of 1995, I was the night watchman at the Marigold Grand, a once-grand casino that had seen better decades. My rounds took me through the opulent...

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The Hollow Static

The first time I noticed the static, I was standing in the kitchen of our new apartment, three weeks after the movers had left. The radio in the living room,...

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The Tenant in the Walls

In the autumn of 2019, my husband and I bought a charming but aging Victorian house in the small town of Ashford, nestled among maple trees that turned fiery red...

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The Pale Figure in the Doorframe

The old house on Cedar Lane had always felt wrong, but for fifteen-year-old Maya, it was home. Her parents had bought it cheap after a foreclosure, and the musty smell...

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The Midnight Warden

I was seven when it first came to me, in the old farmhouse on the outskirts of Larkspur Hollow. The house creaked and groaned like an old man, and the...

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The Locked Ward

Corporal Elias Vance had spent four years in the British Army, most of it in dusty outposts where the only ghosts were the ones you made yourself. But home was...

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The Pencil Prankster

Last autumn, I was hunched over my drafting table in the attic studio of our creaky Victorian house, sketching the final shading on a tree for my architecture class. The...

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The Last Drop of Water

It was a Tuesday, and I was watching my six-year-old niece, Lily, while my sister Jenna ran to the city for a job interview. The list she left on the...

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The Drip in the Static

The Drip in the Static I moved to the outskirts of Reykjavik three months ago, into a converted fish-canning factory that now boasts ‘industrial-chic’ apartments. My girlfriend, Sigrid, loves the...

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The Hanging Thread

Milo had always been attuned to the thin places of the world, the seams where the ordinary frayed into something else. At seventeen, he’d learned to ignore the flicker of...

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The Silent Arithmetic

My name is Danny, and I’m fifteen. About eight months ago, my family moved into a renovated farmhouse on the edge of the Dahlia wetlands. We left a cramped apartment...

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The Lantern at the Turn

At 2:54 AM, the house on Hemlock Lane sat silent, save for the occasional creak of old timbers settling. Jules and her best friend, Callie, had been sneaking out for...

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The Convent’s Last Patient

In the autumn of 2004, I arrived at St. Agatha’s Vocational Institute, a crumbling Gothic pile perched on a hill above the rust-belt town of Millbrook. The building had been...

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The Clank in the Wall

The day Marisol left, the house felt like a held breath. I wandered from room to room, my bare feet slapping against the cool hardwood, the silence so thick it...

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The Phantom’s Gaze

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been haunted by the sensation of a presence behind me. It’s not a fleeting chill or a sudden shiver, but a constant, oppressive...

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The Tar Stains on the Wainscoting

The house on Maple Street had always been a bit off, but we chalked it up to old bones and creaky joints. Built in the 1890s, it had a certain...

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The Circuit’s Lament

The house was an old Victorian on Bramblewood Lane, its bones creaking with every gust of wind. I was fourteen, staying with my grandparents while my mother worked abroad. The...

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The Static Hum

My grandfather’s farmhouse had a rhythm to it—the creak of the porch swing, the mutter of the old generator, and the ever-present hum of the deep well pump that fed...

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The Candle in the Mirror

I had just stepped out of the shower, my skin still prickling with the cool air of the old hacienda my family had inherited in the heart of Jalisco. The...

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