Ghost stories from South Africa

The Static Garden

The first time I heard the static was in the autumn of 1997, when I was eight and the world was made of dust and iron. We lived in a...

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The Perished Companion

The old farmhouse on the edge of the moor had always been a bit too quiet for my liking. My husband, Elliot, had insisted it was a bargain, and with...

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The Porcelain Visitor

It has been three years since my wife and I bought the old farmhouse on the edge of Thistlewood. The land had been abandoned for decades, and the house itself...

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The Last Fruit of the Baobab

It began with the same dream, night after night, like a splinter lodged in my mother’s mind. She would wake with a scream caught in her throat, her nightgown soaked...

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The Crib Side Down

I was maybe three, still young enough to be in a crib with one side down, parked next to my parents’ bed in the old farmhouse. The room was large,...

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The Glass Table

It was the summer I turned thirteen, and my sisters and I were staying with our grandparents in the small town of Ashwick, far from the noise of the city....

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The Last Greenhouse

In March, I brought my daughter to visit my aunt at her orchard in the foothills. She was seven, all energy, and spent her time chasing lizards and turning over...

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The Fossil in the Amber

In early autumn, I moved into a converted lighthouse on the coast of Maine, hoping to finish my novel. The place was isolated, wrapped in fog, and the sea’s constant...

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The Faceless Commuter

It was a Tuesday evening in early autumn, and I was walking home from the old mill where I work the night shift. The streets of our town, normally buzzing...

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The Hollow Cradle

It was the summer I turned thirty-two, and I had finally worked up the courage to email my stories to the Weird Occurrences Digest. My first submission had gone in...

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The Cardboard Box Under the Stairs

I never put much stock in the supernatural. My friend Marta would jab a finger at the air and claim my dead aunt had just tapped her shoulder, but I’d...

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The Red-Trimmed Mirror

In the damp autumn of my ninth year, my family uprooted from the gray coastal town of my birth to a landlocked hamlet named Ashwick, where the houses leaned like...

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The Uninvited Gulls

The cottage at Seal Point had been our weekend retreat for years, but this Saturday was different. My wife, Eleanor, and I had agreed to house-sit for our daughter, Cara,...

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The Man Who Slept Under the Stairs

In the cramped corridors of Maple Court, a three-story walk-up in the rusted heart of Detroit, we all knew the man who slept under the stairs. His name was Old...

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Old Man

For those that know Johannesburg, Florida, there are a lot of town houses and complexes that are rather old. In saying that there are people that lived there for a...

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The Chilling Draft

The day we first saw the house, the agent called it ‘a diamond in the rough.’ It was a sprawling Victorian perched on a hill in the old mill town...

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The Sandman’s Ledger

The house on Marrow Lane was never ours, not really. It was a temporary arrangement, a rental while we searched for something permanent. The walls were a sickly yellow, the...

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The Queen of Hearts

The last time I saw Elara, she was shuffling a deck of cards with a smile that could have charmed a snake. Her fingers, gnarled by eighty-seven years, moved with...

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The Scent of Smoked Apples

Elara had always been sensitive to the lingering traces of the past, but it was a gift she never welcomed. The old farmhouse in the Appalachian foothills, which she and...

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The Last Pinprick of Light

The last thing Elara remembered before the light died was the faint hiss of the effervescent tablet dissolving in her glass. She had been fighting a cold for weeks, a...

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The Door Left Ajar

Marta and I had always shared our old farmhouse with… something. Not a ghost in the traditional sense, more like a gentle presence that occasionally flickered the lights or nudged...

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The Cartographer of Unmade Roads

The summer I turned seventeen, I found a map that wasn’t there. It was tucked inside the lining of an old suitcase my grandmother left me—a suitcase I’d never opened...

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The Cradle’s Hollow

We’d moved to the old farmhouse just outside the small town of Ashford, a place where the fields stretched into a gray haze and the wind carried the smell of...

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The Dropped Shadow

I never thought much about my grandmother’s stories of the old country, of the things that crawled in the walls of her childhood home and the marks they left on...

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