Ghost stories from South Africa

The Last Cinder

In the autumn of 1994, the small coastal town of Portharrow watched its primary school, St. Marnoch’s, expand to accommodate a rising tide of students. The Victorian-era main building, with...

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The Pattern in the Parlor

I used to think a house was just walls and a roof, a place to sleep and eat. But after we moved into that old Victorian on the edge of...

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The Mirrorglass Passenger

I’ve worked the late shift at the Solace Valley distribution center for three years, and my cousin Darnell has been my ride-share buddy for two. We live in the same...

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The Refraction of Absence

I was seven when I first noticed the house at 14 Marrow Lane didn’t just creak—it breathed. The walls would sigh in the dead of night, and the floorboards would...

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The Conductivity of Grief

My name is Daniel, and for two years I worked as a field geologist in the copper mining district of Yavapai County, Arizona, during the late eighties. The site was...

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The Stairwell of Lost Things

When I was eight, my family moved from the dusty heat of a small inland town to a sprawling Victorian house that leaned against the edge of Cape Town. We...

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The Granary at Gable End

The summer I turned eight, my great-aunt Josephine passed away, leaving the family’s ancestral farmhouse, Gable End, to my mother. We moved there that August, leaving behind our cramped city...

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The Salt Line

My grandmother, Elena, kept a row of glass jars on the highest shelf of her pantry, each filled with something I wasn’t supposed to touch. I knew her as a...

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The Wailing Behind the Wall

In the summer of 2014, my daughter, Lily, was just a few months old, and my husband, Tom, and I lived in a converted garage behind a grand Victorian house....

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The Static Between Breaths

The first time I saw her, the air in my room turned thick like wet wool. It was a Tuesday, maybe, or a Wednesday—the kind of night where the heat...

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The Clockmaker’s Gift

Mara had always been attuned to the quiet hum of her apartment, the creaks and sighs of the old building settling into her bones like a familiar tune. But when...

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The Glass-Dry Lullaby

My grandmother had a saying: ‘The house remembers what the walls hear.’ We never paid it much mind, not until the summer my uncle Marco moved back in with us...

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The Engineer’s Palindrome

The year I turned twelve, my parents sent me to St. Agatha’s School for Girls, a gray-stone convent perched on a cliff above the sea. The nuns were strict, the...

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The Papercut Sorrow

My first memory of the house on Hemlock Lane is the smell of old paper and dust. We moved there when I was six, my mother, my father, and my...

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The Colossus of Kettlewood

In the autumn of 2015, I was a 29-year-old archivist living in the town of Kettlewood, a place of faded brick and perpetual mist. My uncle, Elias, had died two...

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The Ceramic Clink

It was the weekend of the fourteenth of January when the world tilted back on its axis, and I found myself, bags in hand, leading my children up the narrow...

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The Cobalt Bloom

I had just moved into the Meridian Flats, a gleaming tower of glass and steel that seemed to float above the city’s grime. The building was immaculate, with a lobby...

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The Mannequin in the Intersection

As a rule, I avoid driving through the industrial district of Port Meridian after sunset. The old warehouses and shuttered factories become a maze of blind corners and broken streetlights,...

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The Pool That Remembered

The house on Cedar Ridge wasn’t our first choice. My mother, Eleanor, had a checklist: bay windows for her plants, a kitchen with a butler’s pantry, and a backyard that...

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The Room That Remembered

The bus wheezed to a stop outside the gates of St. Dymphna’s House, a faded Victorian mansion that had once been a convent. I stepped off, my duffel bag hanging...

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The Needle’s Lament

I have always believed that the objects we handle absorb a little of our lives, a stitch of our joy, a patch of our sorrow. That old Singer in my...

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The Foxglove Field

In the summer of 1987, my mother, Eleanor, and I inherited her grandmother’s farm nestled in the rolling hills of Vermont. The property had been in our family for generations,...

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The Last Frame

My grandmother, Elena, died in 1962, when my mother was only six. She has been a quiet, watchful presence in our house ever since, not malevolent, but not exactly warm...

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The Third Night of the Lantern

In the autumn of 2011, I was twenty-two, living in the quiet, rain-soaked town of Ashford, Oregon. My grandmother had passed away, and as per our family’s old traditions, we...

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