Ghost stories from Voices

The Man in the Lantern Light

Eleanor’s first memory was of the man in the top hat. She couldn’t have been more than five, standing at the foot of the stairs in their old, creaking house...

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The Woman at the Crossroads

I was twelve the summer Grandma Ruth died. My parents sent me to stay with Aunt Mildred in the sleepy town of Morrow Creek while they sorted out the estate....

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The Clatter of the Half-Filled Cups

Three years ago, I was staying at my friend Mara’s apartment for the weekend. We had been up late, binge-watching horror films until nearly 2 AM, and then we turned...

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The Unlit Stairwell

I was sixteen when we moved to the old farmhouse on Cedar Hollow Road, a place my mother inherited from a cousin she barely mentioned. The house sat at the...

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The Blue-Hooded Visitor

My name is Laura, and I’ve had a few encounters with the other side that I can’t explain away. The first time happened in the autumn of 2018, when my...

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The Lantern Man in the Orchard

The summer I turned thirteen, my father and I missed my great-aunt Margaret’s wedding to a man none of us knew well. She had met him in a grief support...

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The Signal of the Twelfth Bell

The first time I saw it, I was nine, in the old farmhouse my parents rented that summer. The house had a peculiar feature: a massive grandfather clock in the...

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The Hollow Floor

In the autumn of 2001, a fresh government had just taken the reins in the capital city of Veyra, and the press office of the Presidential Palace was a hive...

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The Hanging Coat

I remember the autumn I turned nine, the year the old mill shut down and the town of Ashford fell quiet. My family had moved into a creaking Victorian house...

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The Girl with the Brass Locket

The monsoon had carved a new channel through the red earth, and the air in my aunt’s compound smelled of wet clay and frangipani. I’d flown in from California, my...

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The Watcher in the Corner

I remember the day my brother, his wife, and their three daughters moved into that old farmhouse on the outskirts of Dromore, a village so small it barely appeared on...

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The Painted Candle

The first thing my mother noticed about the old farmhouse was the smell—like damp earth and burnt sugar. We’d moved there after the divorce, seeking a fresh start in the...

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The Grease Stain on the Ceiling

I never believed in the word ‘haunted’ until I met my mother’s cousin Lenny. He was a big, greasy man who owned a diner outside of Pinedale, a dying town...

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The Bell Tower’s Tenant

I never told anyone about the night I saw the man in the bell tower. It was the summer I turned sixteen, and my family had just moved into the...

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The Baited Silence

The nights on Tavarua were always thick with the smell of salt and the murmur of the Pacific, but when the tide crept in over the mangroves, the real work...

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The Pale Courier

It was the summer we turned fifteen, and every Friday night was sacred for our sleepovers. This particular Friday, we were at my place, the old farmhouse at the edge...

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The Flicker in the Hall

I was nine when we left the endless white of Pond Inlet for the cramped, utilitarian streets of Iqaluit. The move was a blur of cardboard boxes and my mother’s...

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The Salted Honeymoon

The summer of 2010 was a cruel joke on the coast of Texas. The tar balls washed up like black tears on the sand, and the air smelled of crude...

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The Glass Between Me and the Unfinished

I was fourteen when the house on Cinnamon Street taught me that some silences are heavier than others. We’d moved there the previous winter, a sprawling ranch-style place with floor-to-ceiling...

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The Shape at the Threshold

Marta lived in a small, cluttered apartment above a laundromat on the edge of a city she’d never quite gotten used to. The perpetual hum of the washing machines below...

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The Painter’s Lament

It was late autumn when we decided to finally repaint the upstairs hallway. The old color, a faded mustard, had begun to peel near the ceiling, and the musty smell...

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The Sunroom’s Accounting

My great-aunt Edna’s house, a cramped, two-story saltbox built in 1931, had a peculiar geography. It sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in a town that time had forgotten,...

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The Glass-Faced Saint

The desert highway at two in the morning is a different country. The headlights of my Corolla carved a thin corridor through the dark, and the heat off the asphalt...

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The Ledger of Misfortune

The winter of my twenty-first year was a season of losses, each one piling onto the next like snowdrifts against a failing door. I’d left university with a suspended scholarship,...

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