Ghost stories from Voices

The Clover Warning

In the autumn of 1989, my fiancé Marcus and I decided on a final camping trip before our November wedding. We drove deep into the pine woods of northern Minnesota,...

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The Spinning Top in Room 3B

The first time I saw the boy, I was hauling a box of my great-uncle’s old clothes up to the fourth-floor storage room of the Everhart Hotel. The hotel had...

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The Stairwell at 3:27

The first time I saw it, I was coming down from the attic, a box of old Christmas ornaments in my arms. The stairwell light was a sickly yellow, barely...

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The Ceiling Watcher

I remember the summer of 2005, not for the usual reasons a thirteen-year-old might recall a summer, but because it was the summer my grandfather decided to demolish the old...

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The Unraveling Room

My family’s arrival in Okinawa was meant to be an adventure, a fresh start under a foreign sun. My father, a civil engineer, had been assigned to a three-year project...

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The Hollow Night

In the sweltering summer of 1934, on a sun-scorched farm in the Kansas dust bowl, ten-year-old Nellie Mayhew lay awake in the suffocating heat of the attic bedroom she shared...

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The Pattern in the Hallway Carpet

I was fifteen when I came to live with my grandmother in the old family house, a rambling Victorian relic on the edge of a town that seemed to have...

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The Gardener’s Promise

At thirteen, I’d already learned that houses with cheap rent come with secrets. Ours was a crooked Victorian wedged between a swamp and a cemetery so old the headstones leaned...

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The Lumberjack in the Queue

The parking lot stretched out like a black sea, dotted with the occasional island of a sodium lamp. My girlfriend, Maya, and I had ridden every ride at the Crestfall...

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The Vent’s Gaze

It started the winter after I moved into the old farmhouse on Hollow Creek Road. The house had stood empty for years, its bones creaking with age, and I was...

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The Hollow in the Hall

After the funeral, I thought the worst was behind us. But Marla, Delia’s sister, seemed to have vanished into the deepest well of sorrow. She barely ate, barely spoke, and...

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The Red Ledger

It was a Tuesday, or maybe a Wednesday—nights blur together when you’re a night-shift archivist. My younger brother, Milo, had claimed the guest room because he’d seen a documentary about...

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The Hollow Man in the Pines

I have always been prone to seeing shapes in the corner of my eye, but these past few months, the shapes have started to linger. It began after we moved...

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The Persistent Visitor

I’m Elara, and I’m fourteen. We moved into this old farmhouse in the Welsh countryside when I was six. It was charming, with its creaking floors and ivy-covered walls, but...

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The Clatter in the Crawlspace

When we moved into the prefab on the edge of the Ponderosa Pines, I thought the creaks were just the house settling. The previous owners had left in a hurry,...

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The Grey Boy at Thornefield

I had taken the morning-after pill exactly as directed, three days before, and felt nothing more than a faint, metallic taste at the back of my throat, which I chalked...

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The Cane in the Attic

My grandmother’s house sat on a dead-end road, the last remnant of a farm swallowed by pine woods. I always got the attic bedroom, a narrow room with sloping eaves...

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The Rattling Blind

The heat of late July pressed against the windows of the old farmhouse like a lazy beast, and I, Mara, had surrendered to the afternoon’s lethargy. I had drifted in...

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The Threshold Watcher

Elara had always been sensitive. As a child, she’d seen things that others couldn’t, felt vibrations in the air that others dismissed as imagination. But it wasn’t until she moved...

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The Green Dress

I never thought much about the mirrors in my grandmother’s house until I moved in after the funeral. The place had been in the family for generations, a sprawling Victorian...

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The Hollow Hour

Our room was on the second floor of the old farmhouse, a long, narrow space with two single beds shoved against opposite walls. The window faced the barn, and at...

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The Cradle of Static

It began not many months ago, at the edge of dawn, when the world outside my window was a smear of grey and the only sound was the hum of...

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The Lily on the Landing

The first time I saw her, I was six, standing in the hallway of my grandmother’s farmhouse in the hills of Appalachia, the bathroom door ajar behind me. The house...

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The Porcelain Doll

When I was sixteen, my family lived in an old farmhouse at the end of a long gravel road. The house had been in my mother’s family for generations, and...

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