Ghost stories from Netherlands

The Cartographer’s Bargain

I was eleven when I first pressed my forehead to the cold glass of my bedroom window and whispered a name I had found in my great-uncle’s diary. His name...

Read Story →

The Kitchen Door

It was the summer of the long drought, and the night air was so still and warm that sleeping felt impossible. I had been lying on the grass in the...

Read Story →

The Bamboo Debt

Marta, a 26-year-old archivist, lived in a small, perpetually damp town in the Pacific Northwest. Her father, a quiet man of mixed Filipino and Dutch descent, had recently passed, leaving...

Read Story →

The Persistent Flame

My wife, Clara, and I moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of town after it had been abandoned for seven years. The previous owners had left in a...

Read Story →

The Night the Wardrobe Shifted

Growing up, my family lived in a cramped, pre-war walk-up on the third floor of a building that always smelled of boiled cabbage and damp plaster. The apartment itself was...

Read Story →

The Indentation on the Faded Quilt

Several months ago, on a damp October evening, I found myself alone in my grandmother’s old farmhouse, tasked with sorting through her belongings before the estate sale. The house smelled...

Read Story →

The Last Cartographer’s Warning

I have always been a rational man, a surveyor by trade, and my life has been a series of measured lines and calculated angles. But there are places where geometry...

Read Story →

The Game We Never Finished

When I was four, the house on Marrow Lane felt like a castle of shadows and creaking floorboards. My brother, Elias, was nine and my best friend. One night, long...

Read Story →

The Sunday Paper Prophecy

I never considered myself haunted, not in the way movies portray it. No cold spots, no flickering lights, no spectral apparitions in the hallway. But I’ve learned that my mind...

Read Story →

The Crate in the Cellar

My name is Elara, and I live in a crumbling Victorian house that my great-aunt left me. It’s not the cobwebs or the creaking floorboards that bother me; it’s the...

Read Story →

The Cinder Room

I used to work at a haunted house attraction called The Hollow, housed in a former textile mill outside Pittsburgh. My job was to play a vengeful spirit in a...

Read Story →

The Humming Wire

When we moved into the old farmhouse outside Dundee, I was only six, but I remember the smell of damp wood and the sound of the wind whistling through a...

Read Story →

The Marigold Halo

The summer I turned thirty, I moved into my great-aunt’s house in the hills of Vermont, a place she’d left to me in her will. It was a cramped, dusty...

Read Story →

The Cinder-Woman

The summer I turned thirteen, my family drove seven hours to a remote cabin in the Dustpine National Forest. My father had rented it for two weeks to escape the...

Read Story →

The Midday Walkers

I take the old service road past the grain silos and the abandoned tractor depot on my way to the station. It’s a straight, gray ribbon of asphalt that cuts...

Read Story →

The Locker That Ate Time

It was a Tuesday, the kind of grey, forgettable Tuesday that made you question if you’d lived it before. I was at the end of my shift at the Meridian...

Read Story →

The Lantern of Last Light

In the coastal town of Saltmarsh, where the sea gnawed at the cliffs and the fog rolled in like a living thing, I lived with my husband, Elias, and his...

Read Story →

The Salt Line

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. Not until I moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the Morrow Creek. My ex, Lena, had inherited it from her...

Read Story →

The Graveyard’s Debt

I’ve always been what you’d call a rational man. Numbers, logic, cause and effect—that was my world. Ghosts were for children and the overly imaginative. So when my friends suggested...

Read Story →

The Persistence of the Unseen

I’ve always been a person who trusts their senses. But there are moments, brief and sharp, that have made me question the very fabric of what I perceive as real....

Read Story →

The Photograph in the Drawer

I’ve been sorting through my late aunt’s belongings for weeks now, ever since I inherited her old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, Vermont. The house was a rambling, two-story...

Read Story →

The Narrow Passage

I was eleven when we moved into the apartment on the third floor of a crumbling building on Marrow Lane. The rent was cheap, which was the only reason my...

Read Story →

The Charred Locket

After Maeve and I had been dating for eight months, we moved into a creaky Victorian house on the edge of the lumber town of Pine Hollow. We shared a...

Read Story →