Ghost stories from India

The Cinder-Spirit of the Old Orchard

Our house rose from the bones of a forgotten peach orchard, the soil still dark and rich with the rot of old fruit. My father, a man of practical hands...

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The Damp Spot on the Ceiling

The rain hadn’t stopped for three days. It drummed against the tin roof of the old farmhouse with a rhythm that felt almost intentional, like something was tapping out a...

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The Third Bell

The old mill house sat at the end of a gravel road, its red paint flaking like dried blood. I’d moved there for the cheap rent and the quiet, hoping...

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The Breath in the Dark

The train rattled through the Sri Lankan countryside, past tea plantations and forgotten temples, until it ground to a halt at a station that seemed to exist only in the...

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The Twelfth Step

It was on a humid August evening when my brother, Daniel, called me from a hospital on the outskirts of the city. His voice was thin, frayed, like a rope...

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The Murmuring Hollow

It started with a vacancy in the periphery—a stillness that didn’t belong. I was eighteen, working the night shift at a highway rest stop called the Murmuring Hollow, a name...

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The Salt and the Stone

In the dusty attic of a decaying farmhouse outside the town of Morrow’s Hollow, Eleanor found her great-aunt’s grimoire. The book was bound in cracked leather, its pages filled with...

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The Marble Floor’s Memory

Three years after we moved into the glass-and-steel high-rise in the middle of downtown, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that our apartment was watching me. The building was modern,...

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The Binding Summer

The summer of 2012 had been brutal, with heat advisories and power outages plaguing the city. My master bedroom’s air conditioner had died, so I moved to the guest room...

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The Hollow Fence

Three winters ago, I joined a small group of friends for a weekend retreat in the hills of Ooty, a misty hill station tucked away from the bustle of southern...

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The Last Route Map

The digital clock on my dashboard read 00:07 when I pulled out of the parking lot, the orange sodium lights of the depot fading in my rearview mirror. My name...

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The Hollow Coop

Raymond had always been a dreamer, and his latest dream was to own a poultry farm. He convinced his cautious friend, Daniel, to join him in the venture. They leased...

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The Paperweight

It began with a promotion, and it ended with a paperweight. I suppose that’s the neatest way to frame it, though ‘neat’ is a word that lost all meaning on...

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The Breath on the Back of My Neck

I was a long-haul trucker, and my mother and I shared a cramped, two-bedroom apartment above a 24-hour laundromat in the industrial outskirts of a city I’d rather not name....

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The Third Stroke of Midnight

In the autumn of 2011, I was a postgraduate student at a university in southern Sweden, living in a dormitory that had once been a tuberculosis sanatorium. The building was...

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The Charred Wall

My name is Mira, and I’m from Pune. Since I was a child, I’ve had a peculiar sensitivity to the unseen. I’d see shapes in the corner of my eye,...

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The Lattice of the River

This happened not to me, but to my friend Arjun, who lives in the town of Bhadravati, a place of iron and steel, but also of old forests and older...

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The Clay Pit of Pindari

I’ve always been a rational man. I don’t believe in ghosts, spirits, or the things that go bump in the night. At least, I didn’t. But after what happened at...

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The Hollow Cheer

Maya had always prided herself on being a heavy sleeper. In the two years she’d lived in the converted carriage house behind the old Wainwright estate, she’d slept through thunderstorms,...

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The Carved Sun

My name is Meera, and I am a 29-year-old single mother to a two-year-old boy named Arjun. We live in the city of Jaipur, Rajasthan, not far from my parents’...

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The Salt Trail

Every summer, my grandmother would send me to stay with her sister, great-aunt Mira, in the old hill town of Khandala. The house, a sprawling colonial relic, sat at the...

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The Lamp in the Corridor

My name is Arjun and I live in the hill town of Nainital. At nineteen, I’ve heard my father, Vikram, recount his strange encounter from 1994 countless times. He and...

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The Concrete Orchard

I work for a company that manages data centers, and our newest facility is tucked away in an industrial park called the Meridian Complex. It’s a maze of identical gray...

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The Burnt Ledger

The idea of a haunted hotel had thrilled me ever since I booked our stay at the Monro Estate, a sprawling colonial mansion perched on the misty slopes of Coonoor....

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