Ghost stories from United States

The Engine’s Lament

In the autumn of that year, my friends and I found ourselves in the grip of a peculiar boredom. We were in the small town of Ashford, where the most...

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The Backyard of December

I was eight when we moved into the old carriage house behind the Cutler Funeral Home. It wasn’t a place for kids, not really. The building was three stories of...

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The Eighth Hour Bell

In the autumn of my sophomore year, I lived with my grandmother in the small desert town of Pinnacle Flats, where the high school’s clock tower loomed over everything like...

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The Droning in the Ductwork

For my thirty-second birthday, I convinced my girlfriend, Mara, to join me for a weekend getaway in the bustling city of Ashford. We had booked a room in the grand,...

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The Hollow Man of Dead Man’s Drop

Last October, I decided to take a breather from the city and visit my cousin’s cabin on the edge of the Ponderosa Pines. The air was crisp with the scent...

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The Croaking Hum

When I was eight, my family moved to a creaky old farmhouse on the edge of a town that seemed to have forgotten itself. My room was at the end...

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The Clockwork Heart

The antique shop on Bramble Street was my sanctuary, a place where time itself seemed to slow. I’d spent countless hours among the dust and polished brass, cataloging the oddities...

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The Blue Coat at Fort Mercer

It had been exactly one year since my family’s trip to Fort Mercer, a reconstructed colonial outpost nestled in the pine forests of upstate New York. My father, an amateur...

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The Concrete Shelf

The day I moved into the bungalow on Killdeer Lane, the realtor handed me the keys with a nervous smile. She said the last family had moved out in a...

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The Blue Room

Every summer, my family would drive six hours to my Aunt Cora’s farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, a sprawling Victorian relic that had been in her husband’s family for...

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The Weeping Cog

The room I use for writing is a cramped, windowless cell at the back of a renovated mill. The walls are exposed brick, and a single fluorescent tube hums overhead,...

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The Weight of Unfinished Work

It was the autumn after my grandfather, Harlan, passed. He’d been a carpenter, a man who could mend a clock or a fence post with equal patience. We lived in...

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The Awl in the Pine

The house on Hemlock Road wasn’t Victorian, but it was old, nearly a century, with a sagging porch and a square tower that looked like a mistake. We moved in...

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The Orchard’s Last Bloom

Two summers ago, my cousin Lena, her friend Marcus, and I were lounging on the back porch of Lena’s farmhouse, which sits on the edge of an old apple orchard....

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The Knocking Code

I’ve known Marnie since I was three, when she first appeared at the foot of my crib, a small girl in a damp, gray dress, her hair a tangle of...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Lament

The night air was thick with the scent of rain-soaked pine and damp earth as I lay in my narrow bed, the steady rhythm of my breath the only sound...

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The House on Marrow Lane

I woke to the sound of footsteps on the stairs. They were heavy, deliberate, like a man in work boots, not the light patter of children. My heart hammered against...

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The Static in the Walls

My name is Lily, and I’m twelve. I know that’s the first thing you noticed, and maybe you’re already thinking, ‘Oh, just a kid with an overactive imagination.’ But I’m...

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The Cold Grove

My grandfather used to tell me that land remembers. He said the soil keeps what it’s given, even when the world above forgets. I never understood that until I found...

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The Salt Room

My childhood was split in two: first, the gray concrete of the Edison Courts projects, where the elevators always smelled of piss and the stairwells echoed with arguments that never...

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The Dripping Tap

I had lived in the old farmhouse for eleven months, and except for the occasional creak of settling timber, it had been as quiet as a graveyard at noon. That...

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The Static in the Walls

My name is Eleanor Vance, and I grew up in a house that breathed. Not in the poetic sense, but in the way that the walls seemed to press in...

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The Borrowed Room

In the autumn of 1995, my husband, Walter, and I had just moved into a sprawling Victorian house in the quiet town of Millbrook. The house was beautiful, with high...

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The Frequency of Static

My name is Margaret, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of the dark. Not the absence of light, but the presence of something in that...

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