Ghost stories from Romania

The Resonance of 3:28

Marta had always found comfort in the solitude of her remote cabin in the Smoky Mountains. The nearest neighbor was miles away, and the only sounds at night were the...

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The Nest of Broken Wings

The summer I turned twelve, my parents sent me and my twin brother to a mountain sanatorium in the Carpathian foothills, a place called Piatra Cucedului. It was a bleak,...

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The Sunlit Stroll

In the autumn of 2012, I met a man whose name I still whisper to the wind. He was twenty years my senior, confined to a wheelchair by a cruel...

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The Scent of Lavender

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. I was a scientist, a woman of logic and reason, and I explained away every oddity with a rational thought. But then I...

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The Empty Rooms of the House on Frostbite Lane

I never thought I’d be the one to ask for help. I was the one people came to, the steady one, the one who always knew what to do. But...

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The Split Milk

It began with a broken cup. Not just any cup, but the one my grandmother had painted with roses and a thin gold rim, which had sat on my shelf...

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The Sigil of Salt and Iron

I’ve always prided myself on my rational mind. Sleep paralysis, they said, is just a glitch in the sleep-wake cycle. The hallucinations are projections of your own fear. I read...

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Lena had always considered herself a rational person. She taught biology at the local community college, dissecting frogs and explaining the intricacies of cellular respiration with the same dispassionate ease...

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The Glass Chime

The first place we rented after moving to the coast was a converted lighthouse. It was a strange, round structure with thick stone walls and a spiral staircase that wound...

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The Painted Door

I never believed in ghosts. Not until the door in our new apartment started to bleed. My brother, Andrei, had moved to the city for work, leaving me and my...

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The Night Compass

I moved to the English countryside nearly five years ago, taking a job as a night carer at a small, privately run hospice called Thornfield House. It was a Victorian...

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The Weeping Orchard

My name is Elena, and until last autumn, I believed the dead only whispered from the edges of my vision—white shapes that dissolved when I turned my head. I grew...

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The Painted Window

I had been dating Marcus for just over a year when he invited me to spend a long weekend at his family’s property in the countryside. He’d always been a...

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The Damp Room

The old hospital had been boarded up for years, but we knew a way in through the laundry chute. It was a game we played, Mark, Lena, and I. We’d...

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The Red Lantern Ritual

The night my cousin Marta brought up the old Trapp house, we were all sitting on the porch of my grandmother’s farmhouse, swatting at mosquitoes and listening to the cicadas...

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The Keeper of the Dry Fountain

My grandmother always told me that if you want to see what the world is truly made of, you have to believe it can hurt you. I took that to...

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The Glass Crown of Ashenmere

The first time I saw him, I was drowning in a sea of black velvet. The dream began in a forest of twisted birch trees, their bark peeling like old...

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The Pale Grove Shudder

It was a Thursday night, and the last thing Marta wanted was another dead-end evening in the dust-choked town of Granite Hollow. She’d agreed to meet her cousin Finn and...

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The Uncommissioned Portrait

The old house on Marrow Lane had always felt like a living thing, its walls breathing with the memory of a century of families. I had moved in three months...

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The Vanishing Bench

The summer of my seventeenth year was a sticky, oppressive thing, a heat that clung to the skin like a second, unwanted layer. My friend, Andrei, and I were cutting...

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The Moisture Mark

I wasn’t the sort of person who believed in haunted houses or lingering spirits. I was an electrician, a man of circuits and currents, who trusted only what could be...

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The Clockwork Visitor

I was six, and my grandmother, a woman with more stories than years, loved to drag me along on her visits to the old folk. I didn’t mind, not really....

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The Ragged Gatekeepers

In the summer of my ninth year, my mother and I moved to the high valley of Vâlcea, where my stepfather’s family had a crumbling stone house at the edge...

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The Late Night Signal

On a cold December night in 2014, in the quiet town of Millbrook, Alex and his girlfriend, Clara, were messaging each other on their laptops. It was almost 2 a.m.,...

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