Ghost stories from United States

The Winter of the Loom

My name is Adele, and I am 29. Until last year, I lived in a small, isolated town called Grey Hollow, nestled in a valley that seemed to catch every...

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The Birchwood Marker

I’d nearly forgotten the whole thing until my father’s colleague, a man named Pete, came back from his vacation up north with a strange story. He swore he’d seen a...

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The Hollow Man of Cinder Hills

I knew the moment we turned onto the gravel road that I’d made a mistake coming back. The house sat at the end of a long, unkempt drive, its windows...

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The Loom in the Linen Closet

My grandmother’s house sat on a hill overlooking the salt marshes, a place where the fog rolled in like a gray tide. I’d grown up with the odd creaks and...

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The Lantern in the Corn

I never believed in the old stories about the corn, not until that summer when my little brother, Samuel, started talking about the light. We lived in a farmhouse in...

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The Hollow Squeal

The Thackeray farm sprawled across the fog-choked flats of the Yakima Valley, a place where the wind never quite stopped moaning through the barbed wire. My uncle Delbert had always...

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The Last Bus to Hollow Creek

It started with a note. Not the kind you leave for your mom or tape to the fridge, but a scrap of paper, yellowed and rough as if pulled from...

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The Last Ring

I’ve had my fair share of strange occurrences, but none have shaken me like that night in the old Meridian Hall. It was a converted dormitory for nursing students, a...

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The Lantern in the Hollow

The afternoon sun bled through the dusty windows of the farmhouse, casting long amber streaks across the floorboards. Elara watched her mother, Margaret, who lay motionless in the old brass...

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The Last Streetlight

In the autumn of 2004, I moved into a small rented cottage on the edge of a sprawling, unkempt field, about fifty yards from a lonely stretch of country road....

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The Glass Bottle in the Ravine

It was the summer of 2019 when I was living with my folks in a two-story house at the edge of a small town, backing onto a deep ravine choked...

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The Hollow Crossing

It was a late October evening, and the air had that sharp, metallic bite that precedes the first hard frost. My stepsister, Clara, and I were driving home from a...

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The Persistence of Static

I’ve always been a skeptic, even after everything that happened at my grandmother’s cabin. But now, after this weekend, I’m not sure I can ever look at a television the...

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The Lantern Code

I’ve always been a rational person, a retired engineer who trusts in mechanics and physics. But what happened in the autumn of 2019 in our newly acquired cottage in the...

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The Butcher’s Apron

My grandmother’s farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains was a place of rusted machinery and overgrown pastures. As a child, I’d spend summers there, and I remember...

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The Pale Hitchhiker on County Road 12

This tale was passed down to me not from my father, but from my grandfather, who was a boy in the autumn of 1932. He had gone with his own...

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The Seventh Stall

I was twenty-four when I inherited the old Thornwood stable from my aunt. The place had been abandoned for decades, and the local realtor gave me a deal that felt...

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The Lantern of Lantern Hill

Before I became a professional paranormal investigator, I spent years chasing ghosts with nothing but a disposable camera, a compass, a flashlight, and what my friends called my ‘brass balls’—a...

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The Pen That Wrote Back

The first thing that happened was the pen. I was at the desk in my sister’s room, hunched over a half-finished essay for my summer online course. My sister had...

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The Rotting Gift

The summer I turned seven, we moved from one sagging trailer to another just a stone’s throw away. The old one had a mildewed porch and a furnace that groaned...

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The Red Balloon in the Salt Flats

In the summer of 1998, when I was nine, my great-aunt Edna had a stroke and was hospitalized. My family lived in Nebraska, and we had planned a trip to...

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The Drowned Lantern

My earliest memory of the lake house is the smell of rotting wood and the constant whisper of waves against the dock. I was eight when my parents gave me...

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The Ledger of Unfinished Business

It began, as these things often do, with a single misplaced object. A receipt for a purchase we never made, tucked neatly into the pages of my mother’s favorite cookbook....

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The Empty Overalls

The old farmhouse on Bellhollow Road came to us cheap, which should have been the first warning. My parents, always chasing a bargain, believed they’d found a diamond in the...

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