Ghost stories from Brazil

The Cartographer’s Last Line

I never believed in the sea’s hunger until I saw what it did to Marco. He was a surveyor, not a ghost hunter, but when his brother drowned off the...

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The Static Nest

My friend Ira had a green-cheeked conure named Pip. For years, Pip would chirp and mimic, calling himself ‘Little Green’ in a scratchy voice. Every evening when Ira came home,...

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The Resonance of Dried Roses

The studio was a converted chapel on the outskirts of Pine Hollow, its stained glass windows now boarded over with plywood. The air smelled of dust and old incense, and...

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The Ninth Stroke of Midnight

The old grandfather clock in the hall had been a fixture of Maplehurst Manor for as long as anyone could remember. Its pendulum swung with a solemn, unhurried rhythm, and...

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The Salt Harvest

In the coastal village of Kurohama, the ocean was a jealous god. Every spring, the tide retreated farther than any map predicted, leaving behind a glittering crust of salt on...

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The Last Lobster’s Lament

It was a sweltering Tuesday in late July, the kind of evening where the air hangs thick and heavy, and the cicadas drown out the last of the day’s birdsong....

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The Last Rite of the Hollow Drum

The snow came early that year, blanketing the reservation in a silence so deep it felt like a held breath. My cousin Ela, who had always looked at me with...

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The Night the Hall Light Died

I was crashing at my Uncle Frank’s place for the weekend, a rambling old farmhouse outside a town that barely counts as a dot on the map. Normally I’d bunk...

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The Unmarked Path

The festival grounds lay at the edge of a town that had forgotten its own name, a place where the last streetlight flickered like a dying heartbeat. It was the...

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The Fabric of Memory

I am 34 now, and I have seen things since I was nine, though I only understood what they were much later. My grandmother used to tell me that as...

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The Pale Keeper

The day I found the kitten, the sky was the color of old bone. His fur was a patchwork of gray and white, a little storm cloud with eyes the...

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The Chlorine Afterglow

That summer, when I was eleven, my family lived in a ground-floor flat on the eastern edge of the city, where the old tram lines ended and the new housing...

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The Last Set

I’ve played guitar for over a decade, but the gig at the old Mercury Theatre in Manchester was supposed to be a one-off. My band, The Hollow Frequencies, usually stuck...

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The Cardboard Cathedral

We arrived in Valparaíso on a Tuesday, lured by the promise of crumbling mansions and vibrant murals. The city sprawled over a dozen hills like a drunk giant’s discarded jigsaw...

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The Salt Seller’s Debt

My name is Elias, and I used to work as a night watchman at a salt warehouse in the port town of Grimsby, England. I was 29 when it happened,...

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The Marble Hall’s Debt

Elena had always been the anchor of her friend group, the one who organized the gatherings at the sprawling, century-old mansion her friend Marta had inherited. The house, called Casa...

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The Red Door Incident

I never believed in ghosts until I started working as a night orderly at Saint Dymphna’s, a behavioral health facility tucked in the pine woods of northern Maine. The place...

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The Red Tin Roof

The heat was a wet blanket, thick with the smell of rust and rotting fruit. I’d taken the job at the halfway house on the edge of a town that...

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The Cinder Man’s Return

My family on my mother’s side were rice farmers in the deep bayou country of Louisiana, a place where the water and the land were always fighting for the same...

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The Gate of Dry Grass

The old farmhouse sat at the edge of a vast, dry field that stretched like a yellowing sea toward the dark line of the forest. In the summer of 1974,...

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The Hollow Man of the Red Barn

When I was twelve, my family moved to a crumbling farmhouse in the heart of Iowa’s corn country. The previous owners had left in a hurry, abandoning furniture, a rusted...

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The Paperboy’s Wake

I’ve never told this to anyone, not even my sister. It happened the autumn I turned twelve, in the town of Stillwater, where the river mist clings to the streets...

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The Last Sunset of Porto Alegre

Six months in the grey, rain-slicked streets of Invercargill had leached the colour from my soul. The constant wind, the low sky, the endless flatness—it was a slow suffocation. So...

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The Lantern Man

I was only eleven that summer, staying with my grandmother while my parents worked abroad. Our house was a grand Victorian affair on a quiet, tree-lined street that had, in...

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