The Rag Doll’s Confession
The first sign came three weeks after we’d settled into the bungalow on Cedar Street. I was unpacking a box of old paperbacks when I heard a soft, rhythmic thumping...
The first sign came three weeks after we’d settled into the bungalow on Cedar Street. I was unpacking a box of old paperbacks when I heard a soft, rhythmic thumping...
In the autumn of the year the old plum trees finally died, my cousin Elara had already been gone for eleven months. She was not a woman of grand gestures...
I never thought much about the apartment above mine. It was just the place where the elderly Mr. Hargrove lived, or used to live until he passed in March. The...
The last thing I expected when my mom asked me to house-sit was a ghost. But there I was, alone in her sprawling Victorian rental in a sleepy Oregon town,...
The bedside clock glowed 4:10 AM, its red digits slicing through the darkness like wounds. I blinked, my eyes gritty from sleep, and wondered what had roused me. A chill...
The old farmhouse creaked and groaned around Elara like a dying beast. Dust motes danced in the scant shafts of moonlight that pierced the grimy windowpanes, but Elara rarely saw...
For as long as I can remember, I have felt a presence in the dim corners of rooms. They became more active last winter. Just yesterday, I noticed four or...
The house on Meridian Street was a two-story Victorian, painted a peeling white that glowed sickly under the streetlights. My family moved there when I was eleven, and the first...
I never told my parents about the things that happen in our new house. They would have called it imagination, or stress from my final year of high school. But...
Marla had always been uneasy about the house on Hemlock Lane. It was a sprawling Victorian from the 1890s, set on three overgrown acres, and it had been a boarding...
The Hemlock Lodge sat on a rocky bluff above the icy waters of Lake Superior, a relic of a bygone era with its dark wood paneling and faded portraits of...
We’d been in the old farmhouse for barely a month when the linen closet started eating things. Not in the obvious way, not with a crash or a slam, but...
It was the last Saturday of summer, and the air at Kettleman’s Field had that crisp, dying light that made everything look golden and nostalgic. We were there for Marta’s...
I never told anyone about the man in the laptop. Not my brother, not my mom, not even my best friend. It was our secret, mine and his, even though...
I used to think that the dead could only whisper, never touch. That was before the summer I spent at my grandmother’s house on the salt flats, a place where...
The house on Maplewood Lane had always been quiet, or so I told myself. It was a two-story Victorian with a creaky attic that I’d been meaning to clean out...
The summer I turned thirteen, my cousins and I found an old Ouija board in the attic of our grandmother’s house, a creaking Victorian relic on the edge of the...
The last time I put pen to paper, I was cataloging the oddities that had crept into my life alongside my friend Elara. That felt like a lifetime ago, before...
Our family vacation was at the Pine Shores Resort. One afternoon, I was in the pool when the surface began to fizz and pop. I dove down to look and...
Marta had not slept through the night in three weeks. The insomnia was a creeping thing, born of a sound that arrived like clockwork at 2:47 a.m., a precise, metronomic...
Three weeks after my mother moved into the retirement community, I found myself in her cluttered condo, sorting through a lifetime of belongings. The place had that strange, hollow feel...
The old Mariner’s Rest Inn perched precariously on the cliff overlooking the churning, slate-grey sea. Elara had chosen it for its desolate charm, a stark contrast to the predictable warmth...
It was a humid summer evening in the small town of Bakersville, and the air inside the old farmhouse felt thick with silence. The Henderson children were sprawled across the...
I was fifteen the summer my grandmother passed, and we inherited her house on the edge of the salt marshes. The place had been in the family for decades, but...
Listening to the woods...
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