Ghost stories from United States

The Static Between Tenants

My name is Elias, and for most of my life, I’ve been a skeptic. Ghost stories were for children and the gullible. But that changed when I was sixteen, in...

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The Man in the Basement

I never believed in the supernatural until I moved into the old brownstone on Beacon Street in Boston. It was a cramped, creaking place that my girlfriend, Clara, had inherited...

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The Painted Room

My friend Lena had inherited her grandmother’s Victorian mansion in the sleepy town of Ravensworth, tucked away from the city’s noise. The house was a labyrinth of creaking floors and...

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Marbles of the Last Floor

The summer I turned sixteen, my father and I moved into the top floor of a crumbling brownstone in the borough of Quincy, a neighborhood where the streetlights flickered like...

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The Bell That Wouldn’t Ring

The morning sun bled through the curtains like watered-down wine, but I knew better than to trust it. The clock read 11:00 AM, and I had to drag myself out...

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The Day the House Went Cold

In the autumn of 2011, I was living with my father in the old farmhouse that had been in our family for generations. The house was nestled in a valley...

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The Grip of the Unseen

My grandmother always said the woods remembered. That they kept the bones of every mistake, every secret buried under moss and root. I used to think she was just being...

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The Sixth Sick Day

My husband, Daniel, and I moved into the old Coldwater place in the autumn of ’88. It was a sprawling, sun-starved house with peeling paint and a porch that sagged...

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The Hollow Wall

My mother told me about the year we lived in the old mill house, and what happened to my sister before I was born. We had moved from the city...

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The Bell in the Attic

We had lived in the old farmhouse for five years, and the usual quirks had become almost mundane. The creaking floorboards in the hallway, the cold drafts that swept through...

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The Null Above the Cut

In the late autumn of 1995, I was a night-shift security guard at the Pine Hollow Dam, a massive concrete structure that loomed over the Blackwater River gorge in the...

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The Cradle of Ash

The Pinehollow Historical Society had been our client before, but this time it felt different. They’d called us about the old Merriwether Farmhouse, a rambling Victorian that had stood empty...

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The Harvest Portrait

The autumn of my sixth year, my grandmother, Nana Rose, held her annual harvest gathering. Our farmhouse, nestled in the amber fields of Nebraska, was the heart of these celebrations....

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The Glass Operator’s Log

Marta Voss had spent the last decade of her life chasing signals. As a radio astronomer at the High Desert Radio Observatory, she lived by data, not by faith. She...

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The Cold Press

I remember that night in late February, the sort of damp chill that settles into old brick and doesn’t let go. I had just finished a double shift at the...

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The Collector of Lost Hours

The trouble began, I think, with the blackout. Not the one that hit the whole neighborhood—that was just a storm, a tree branch, a transformer. I mean the one that...

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The Clover Warning

In the autumn of 1989, my fiancé Marcus and I decided on a final camping trip before our November wedding. We drove deep into the pine woods of northern Minnesota,...

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The Clockwork Hum

In the autumn of 2015, I found myself in the small, dust-choked town of Marrow, North Dakota, sent there by my company to oversee the digitalization of the local archives....

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The Cinder Path

I’m writing this from the burn unit at St. Anne’s Hospital, my hands swathed in bandages, my face still pink and peeling. They say I’m lucky to be alive. I...

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The Ceiling Watcher

I remember the summer of 2005, not for the usual reasons a thirteen-year-old might recall a summer, but because it was the summer my grandfather decided to demolish the old...

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The Unraveling Room

My family’s arrival in Okinawa was meant to be an adventure, a fresh start under a foreign sun. My father, a civil engineer, had been assigned to a three-year project...

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The Hollow Night

In the sweltering summer of 1934, on a sun-scorched farm in the Kansas dust bowl, ten-year-old Nellie Mayhew lay awake in the suffocating heat of the attic bedroom she shared...

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The Lumberjack in the Queue

The parking lot stretched out like a black sea, dotted with the occasional island of a sodium lamp. My girlfriend, Maya, and I had ridden every ride at the Crestfall...

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The Hundred-Year Gap

The van rattled down the gravel road, headlights cutting through a fog that seemed to have no business being there in late August. Our group, the Spectral Inquiry Society, had...

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