Ghost stories from United Arab Emirates

The Unleashed Spirit

I have a friend, Sajid. We worked together in the same store in Dubai. Sajid, earlier staying with his wife and kids was now alone in his studio apartment as...

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The Crying Room

My name is Priya, and this is what happened in our apartment in Sharjah, where the summer heat presses down like a fist. Our flat is on the ninth floor,...

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The Umbra of the Locked Door

The first time the scratching came, Amara thought it was the desert wind dragging a branch across her window. She lived alone in a converted granary on the edge of...

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The Stonemason’s Vigil

My brother and I had lived in the old carriage house for as long as I could remember. It was a squat, stone structure attached to what had once been...

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The Mirror’s Hunger

Three years ago, I moved to the arid town of Barstow, California, for a job at the solar thermal plant on the edge of the Mojave. My sister, Priya, had...

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The Unseen Tablemate

In the autumn of my twelfth year, I lived in a house that creaked like a ship at sea, surrounded by a forest that swallowed sound. My parents were kind,...

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The Stone of Al-Madina

In the arid outskirts of Marrakesh, where the red earth meets the sky, lies the old district of Al-Madina al-Qadima. My family had moved there for my father’s archaeology work,...

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The Leech of the Walled Garden

It was the dead hour, the cellular purgatory between three and four in the morning, when the old farmhouse seemed to breathe. I lay on my side, facing the wall...

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The Pomegranate Rind

I was nineteen when my grandmother died, and my mother inherited her old house in the countryside of Provence. It had been in our family for generations, and I hadn’t...

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The Tether

It was a Tuesday night in late autumn, and the house on Hemlock Lane felt emptier than usual. I was housesitting for my aunt, a sprawling Victorian that creaked and...

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The Painted Door

It started on a Tuesday, the kind of damp autumn night when the fog rolls in from the marsh and clings to the streets like a second skin. I’d just...

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The Sugar Bowl Cadence

I was eight, maybe nine, the summer we moved into the house on Mulberry Lane. It was a two-story with a wraparound porch and a kitchen that always smelled faintly...

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The Salt Wind and the Dead Man’s Keep

My name is Layla, and I am fourteen and a half. We are a small family—my mother, my father, my younger brother Zayn, and me. My father works as a...

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The Anklet of the Harvest Wind

My first encounter happened during the hottest July on record, when the air itself seemed to sweat. We lived in a two-story farmhouse on the edge of the Barley Plains,...

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The Scent of Saffron

My name is Julian, and I’ve spent most of my life trying to make sense of the things that happened to me when I was a boy. I grew up...

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The Grate

I remember the summer the air conditioner died in our wing of the house. My stepfather, a man of few words and fewer kindnesses, decided that the unit was better...

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The Salt Line

The village of Al-Mazra’a sat at the edge of the Rub’ al Khali, the Empty Quarter, where the sands swallowed light and sound. My family had moved there from Muscat...

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The Marble Pattern

In the summer of 2013, I moved into a compact flat in the heart of Manchester, England. My partner, Liam, had relocated there for work six months prior, and I...

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The Bell That Wouldn’t Ring

Elena and her husband, Marcus, had finally found a place to call their own: a sprawling, old Victorian house on the outskirts of a sleepy town in upstate New York....

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The Basement of Forgotten Keys

We were a pack of restless teenagers, always chasing the next rush of adrenaline. Our usual hunting grounds—the pine woods behind Miller’s farm and the skeletal remains of the old...

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The Dry Garden

The first time I touched the board, I was in my cousin’s flat in Manchester, the grey drizzle tapping the window like a beggar asking for coins. She’d bought it...

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The Map that Breathed

In 2005, I was a twenty-four-year-old cartographer living in a creaking, century-old row house in the old quarter of Lisbon. The place had a melancholy charm, with its tiles and...

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The Stained Linoleum

My name is Adrian Voss, and I still can’t scrub the sight of that linoleum from my mind. It was the autumn of 2014 when we moved into the ground-floor...

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The Last Bell

We called it the Sunken Minaret, though its tower still stood. It was a village swallowed not by water, but by silence. Maps had forgotten it, and the new highways...

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