Ghost stories from United States

The Ribbon’s Return

When I was thirteen, I spent most weekends at my friend Colin’s place, a sprawling old farmhouse on the edge of the county. His sister, Mara, was a year older...

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The Last Train to Redwood Hollow

I’ve always regretted agreeing to ghost hunts on weeknights. The thrill of the chase never quite compensates for the groggy, zombie-like state I stumble through the next day at my...

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The Water’s Patient Guest

The old house on Bramble Lane had a way of holding onto things—dust, creaks, and the faint smell of lavender from my great-aunt’s sachets. My room was once her sewing...

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The Attic Tenant

In the autumn of 2018, I rented a small two-story house on the outskirts of a sleepy town in Oregon, nestled against a dense, ancient forest. The house had a...

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The Last Glow of the Lantern

The snow had been falling for three days straight, blanketing the small town of Pine Hollow in a silence so deep it felt like the world had held its breath....

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The Twelfth Box

In the winter of 1994, in the small town of Ashburn, I was nine years old. My family had just moved into a creaky old house on Maple Street, and...

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The Rusted Gatekeeper

The summer air in Drayton Valley was a wet blanket, thick with the drone of cicadas and the smell of cut grass. I had just finished wrestling with the old...

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The Belladonna Hour

The first time I saw the thing in the wallpaper, I put it down to the cheap gin I’d been drinking. It was the summer I turned eighteen, stuck in...

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The Leaf-Fall Watcher

In the late summer of 2005, I was sitting on the old, weathered trampoline in my friend Maya’s backyard. Her cousin Rachel had come to stay for the week, and...

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The Spinning Room Chime

My husband, Daniel, works the night shift as the facility supervisor at the old Meridian Complex, a sprawling brick behemoth that has loomed over the town of Ashford since 1887....

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The Night They Answered

I was born in the sweltering heat of Arizona, but when I was six, my father’s job transferred us to the damp, evergreen-choked town of Ferndale, Washington. The move was...

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The Lantern in the Fog

I’ve spent thirty years listening to people describe the edges of the world, the moments when the veil between here and elsewhere thins. Most stories are gray, shapeless things—fear of...

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The Grudge of Hollow Creek

Six months after I inherited my grandfather’s farm, the grain silo’s rusted door began to swing open and shut with a rhythmic, defiant clang. The nearest neighbor was a mile...

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The Loom’s Lament

The air in the weaving room hung thick with the ghosts of a century of cotton dust. At 11 PM it was still, the enormous looms standing like silent, rusted...

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The Graveyard Shift Tape

The night air was thick with the smell of rain and old earth as Marta and I settled into the worn plush of the couch in my grandmother’s farmhouse. The...

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The Last Coil of the Serpent

I never believed in the quiet. Our farmhouse sat at the edge of a dying orchard, where the wind seemed to hold its breath, and the floorboards creaked with the...

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The Man Who Fixed the Fence

I never liked the house on Cinder Lane. It wasn’t just the peeling paint or the porch that sagged like a tired spine; it was the way the air thickened...

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The Last Page

I was nineteen, a sophomore at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, where the winter buried everything under gray snow for months. I’d always been a night...

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The Vanishing Ledger

When Marlena and I signed the papers for the old Hargrove place, we thought we were getting a steal. The price was impossibly low, and the realtor’s smile never quite...

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The Perpetual Draft

In the late autumn of 1995, I was the night watchman at the Marigold Grand, a once-grand casino that had seen better decades. My rounds took me through the opulent...

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The Cartographer’s Blight

I never expected to find a kindred spirit in an online forum dedicated to local history, but there she was: a woman named Elara who posted about the unsettling quiet...

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The Static Garden

I always thought the dead were quiet, that if I couldn’t see or hear them, they weren’t there. My girlfriend Mira, her son Theo, and I were visiting the Hillcrest...

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The Tenant in the Walls

In the autumn of 2019, my husband and I bought a charming but aging Victorian house in the small town of Ashford, nestled among maple trees that turned fiery red...

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The Weeping Bamboo

The morning air was crisp as our group of students filed into the Kaʻaʻawa Valley Cultural Center, a modest museum nestled in the lush hills of windward Oʻahu. The wooden...

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