Ghost stories from Malta

The Stairway Watcher

When I was six, we lived in a creaking old farmhouse at the edge of a maple wood. My mother, pregnant with my little brother, was heavy and slow, and...

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The Marrow Man’s Toll

I’d only been working the night shift at the Saltmarsh Care Home for three months, but I already knew the routine: check on Mrs. Albright’s morphine drip, soothe old Mr....

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The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

My aunt Marta was the only one of my mother’s seven siblings who paid attention to the old woman’s tales. When I was a boy, I’d sit on the cracked...

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The Curtain Between

It was a humid August night when my daughter, Lena, came back from her midnight stroll with friends. I was dozing on the sofa, the television mumbling to itself, when...

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The Uniform in the Attic

My grandfather on my father’s side was a soldier, or so I believed. I never met him—he died before I was born—but his faded photographs in our old family album...

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The Saltwater Crossing

The July heat in Portharrow was a wet blanket that clung to every breath. My flat above the chandlery was a brick oven, and sleep was a distant memory. At...

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The Empty Chair Agreement

My nights at the Briarwood Manor were usually as predictable as the slow drip of a leaky faucet. But that night, the air felt heavy, charged with an unease that...

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The Prize in the Frame

Our farmhouse stood alone in the valley, a relic of a time when the land was worked by hand. The upstairs corridor, with its peeling wallpaper and crooked floorboards, had...

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The Room with the Watching Glass

After the move, Clara chose the attic bedroom for its dormer window and the way the morning light pooled on the old pine floor. Her parents had bought the house...

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The Lady of the Faded Gown

At eighteen, I considered myself a skeptic with a curiosity for the unknown. I had grown up listening to my father and uncles trade ghost stories over holiday dinners, their...

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The Stone Visitor

It was the first of November, and the fog had rolled in thick from the river, muffling the town in a gray, wet blanket. Marcus had spent the night at...

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The Hollow Child on the Floorboards

My grandfather, Elias, told me this story only once, on a cold autumn evening when the wind rattled the old farmhouse windows. He was a stern man, not given to...

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The Salt and the Brass

When I was eight, my grandmother took me to the annual harvest fair in our small coastal town of Portharrow. We were queuing for toffee apples when I saw a...

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The Still Life of Shattered Glass

Mara woke to a sound like a gunshot in her bedroom. The digital clock on her nightstand glowed 8:00 AM, and the morning light was just beginning to seep through...

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The Map of Unmarked Doors

The heat in Alexandria was a living thing, coiled around the stones of the old city. We’d rented a flat in a crumbling Ottoman-era building, its facade a patchwork of...

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The Pale Conductor

I was nine years old, walking home from my violin lesson at Mrs. Albright’s house, a good twenty minutes from my own. The autumn evenings in our small town of...

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The Granite Ledger

The island of Kaivos, a speck of black rock in the North Atlantic, existed for the sole purpose of feeding a quarry that had been chewing at its heart for...

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