Ghost stories from United States

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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The Vent’s Gaze

It started the winter after I moved into the old farmhouse on Hollow Creek Road. The house had stood empty for years, its bones creaking with age, and I was...

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The Brand of Salt and Rust

The town of Greyhollow sat in the crook of a mountain range like a dead fly in a spider’s web. The salt mines had long been the heart of the...

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The Lazarus Pager

In the autumn of 2003, my world had settled into a quiet routine after the sudden loss of my fiancé, Adrian, in a car crash that the police ruled as...

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The Whistling Man of Pender County

It was the last evening of our visit to my sister’s place in the quiet outskirts of Pender County, North Carolina. The house sat on a dead-end road, bordered by...

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The Hollow Man in the Pines

I have always been prone to seeing shapes in the corner of my eye, but these past few months, the shapes have started to linger. It began after we moved...

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The Stench of the Hollow

My grandmother always said the woods behind our farm were a place of peace. She’d tell me stories of the old spirits that watched over the land, how they’d guide...

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The Last Station

The Andean night swallowed the village of San Idelfonso like a held breath. I had arrived three weeks prior, sent by the university to catalog the colonial church’s archives. The...

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The Second Shift

I’ve never been one to believe in ghosts, not really. I’ve always been the practical type, the one who checks the carbon monoxide detector and locks the doors twice. But...

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The Lullaby in the Root Cellar

I was six, my brother Eli was seventeen. We had just moved into the old Harlow place on the outskirts of a town called Pine Hollow. The previous owner, a...

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The Clatter in the Crawlspace

When we moved into the prefab on the edge of the Ponderosa Pines, I thought the creaks were just the house settling. The previous owners had left in a hurry,...

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The Ferrous Hum

The first time Mara heard the hum, she was folding laundry in her basement apartment, the one with the water-stained ceiling and the radiator that clanked like a dying beast....

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The Howling Dog

The summer of 1969 wasn’t a very good one for me. I was sixteen and my mother was dying of cancer. I’d known since May that she was terminal, and...

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The Rattling Blind

The heat of late July pressed against the windows of the old farmhouse like a lazy beast, and I, Mara, had surrendered to the afternoon’s lethargy. I had drifted in...

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The Threshold Watcher

Elara had always been sensitive. As a child, she’d seen things that others couldn’t, felt vibrations in the air that others dismissed as imagination. But it wasn’t until she moved...

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The Lantern of Hollow Creek

The call came at 6:47 AM, wrenching me from a groggy sleep on my cousin’s couch in Sacramento. I remember the disjointed fragments: my aunt’s voice, cracked and raw, saying...

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