Ghost stories from Mexico

The Last Fence Post

The last thing Marta remembered of the party was the taste of cheap tequila and the way Carlos’s laugh echoed off the cinderblock walls of his uncle’s ranch. It was...

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The Humid Nights of Callejon del Cielo

I spent last summer at my great-aunt’s house in the highlands of Guatemala, a place called Callejon del Cielo. The house was an old colonial relic, with thick adobe walls...

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The Mudstone Dirge

The rain had not stopped for three days. It drummed on the tin roof of our shack like a relentless fist, and the creek that ran behind our property had...

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The Last Stitch

Elara had always felt a strange pull toward her grandmother’s house, a sprawling Victorian on the edge of a dying New England town. Her grandmother, Agnes, was a warm and...

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The Cast-Iron Gate

In the autumn of 1982, in a dusty hamlet cradled by the Sierra Madre, I was a boy of seven. My mother, a woman of quiet strength, drove us to...

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The Drawers of Dusk

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. I thought my buddy Vincent was just a magnet for strange coincidences. But after everything that happened at the house on Maple Lane,...

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The Vine-Curtained Passage

I used to think that what happened to me and Delia was just a weird, unsettling coincidence. But as the years have gone by, I’ve come to realize that the...

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The Weight of Ash

In the dry, crumbling heart of a border town called Cerro Alto, my mother, Rosa, ran a small botánica. Dust and incense clung to the shelves of saint candles and...

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The Unclaimed Letters of Calle del Sol

I never believed in ghosts, not really. I was a rational kid, always looking for logical explanations. That changed the autumn I turned nineteen, when my mother and I moved...

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The Door That Jams

I was seventeen the summer my mother sent me to my grandmother’s village in the highlands of Oaxaca. The bus ride had been a blur of switchbacks and dust, past...

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The Cartographer’s Ledger

The rain hadn’t stopped for three days, and the old textile mill on the outskirts of Lowell felt like a sponge left to soak. I’d taken a temp job there,...

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The Pale Dress

My mother worked at a flower shop in the old town of Oaxaca, and I spent most of my afternoons there, playing among the roses and baby’s breath. Next door...

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The Man in the Mesquite

The summer I turned eight, my father loaded our rusted Buick with three squirming kids, a suitcase of worn clothes, and a cooler of warm soda, then drove us eleven...

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The Hoofprints at the Fence Line

I never thought much about the land beyond our corral. It was just a stretch of dry grass and scrub that bled into the pines a mile away. We’d been...

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The Wall That Breathed

The first time I saw the wall move, I was nineteen, living in the attic of a boarding house on Hemlock Street. The house was a sagging Victorian relic, painted...

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The Floorboards’ Song

The town of San Isidro was barely a smudge on the map, a collection of sun-bleached houses clustered around a dusty plaza. It was founded just over a century ago,...

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The Ticking of the Old Clock

I was seventeen and living in a small, dusty town in the high deserts of Arizona. My grandfather had passed away two weeks before, and I’d inherited his old wooden...

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The Weight of the Last Step

At the edge of our small town, where the pavement gave way to dirt and the streetlights thinned to darkness, stood the house my family rented. It was a two-story...

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The Saffron Recipe

My parents kept me on a short leash after Camila died. It wasn’t that they said ‘no’ outright, but there was always a reason—a headache, a storm warning, a strange...

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The Remote That Remembered

The summer I turned fifteen, we lived in a house that breathed. Not in a poetic way, but literally—the floorboards would expand and contract with the heat, making the whole...

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The Last Panorama

The summer I turned twenty-one, I traded my textbooks for a pair of worn hiking boots and a map that was already cracking at the folds. Every Friday evening, I’d...

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The Cinder-Watch Pact

When I was fourteen, my family moved to a sprawling, decaying Victorian house on the edge of a town that had long since given up on itself. My parents, in...

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The Staircase Cadence

Two autumns ago, I was sixteen, living with my mother and stepfather in a renovated farmhouse outside a town that seemed to forget it existed. The house was old, with...

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The Perpetual String

The summer I turned seven, my family moved into the old Hadley place, a sprawling Victorian that had been empty for decades. The previous owners, the Hadleys, had died in...

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