Ghost stories from United States

The Carrion Bloom

I am nineteen, and I have lived in the damp, moss-draped countryside of western Oregon for most of my life. The paranormal has always been a quiet undercurrent here—whispers of...

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The Basilisk Hour

My introduction to the dead came not in a moonlit, Gothic cathedral of tombs, but in a sun-bleached, almost cheerful plot of land on the edge of our small town....

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The Hollow Crown

I had nailed the stag’s skull above my bed as a trophy, a testament to the year I spent tracking it through the marshlands. Its antlers branched like gnarled fingers,...

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The Creak of the Third Floor

It started with a flicker of the hallway bulb, a nervous pulse of light that made the peeling wallpaper seem to breathe. Lena lived alone in the top-floor apartment of...

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The Salt Lantern

I was eight when we moved from the sweltering coast of Oaxaca to the dry, flat expanse of West Texas. Dad had a job at the oil refinery, and our...

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The Pattern in the Ashes

I never believed in the old country tales my grandmother used to mutter over her tea leaves. ‘What dies with love, returns with hunger,’ she’d say, and I’d roll my...

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The Drowned Ledger

I live in the flatlands of western Kansas, where the wheat fields stretch like a yellow ocean and the only hills are the abandoned grain elevators that dot the horizon....

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The Glass Rooster

Marta often worked late at the county records office, and by the time she clocked out, the town of Willow Creek had already settled into its quiet, dusty routine. Willow...

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The Cradle of Ice

My name is Elara. I’m not sure if what happened in our home was a ghost, a spirit, or something else entirely—maybe a crack in the fabric of things, a...

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The Last Tarantella

The summer solstice was a week gone, and the heat had settled into the Arkansas backwoods like a sickness. I was hauling a load of antique furniture from a dead...

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The Blue House on Carcass Road

The house was blue, the kind of blue that doesn’t belong in nature, a shade that seemed to have been scraped from a child’s crayon and smeared across the walls....

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The Hollow Field

The old grain silo stood like a broken tooth against the bruised sunset, and for as long as I could remember, the Harper farm had been a place of quiet...

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The Catechism of Salt and Ash

It began with a smell—not the usual must of my grandmother’s house, but something deeper, like wet earth and burnt sugar. I had been staying there for a week, helping...

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The Paint on the Eighth-Floor Landing

In the autumn of 1984, I was a sophomore at Meridian State College, nestled in the rust-belt town of Ashford, Ohio. I lived in the old high-rise dormitory, Thornwood Hall,...

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The Paperweight of St. Elmo

It was the summer I turned seventeen, the summer I thought I’d outgrown the childish fear of the dark. My parents had left for the 24-hour pharmacy to pick up...

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The Weight of Ash

The night after the funeral, I checked into the old Riverview Motel on the outskirts of Copper Creek, a town I’d only passed through with Lucas a lifetime ago. The...

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The Unlit Hallway

I never believed in the supernatural, not until the winter of 2012, when I moved into a century-old farmhouse in rural Ohio. The place was charming enough during the day—creaky...

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The Persistence of Knocking

I moved into the house at the edge of the salt flats three years ago, drawn by the impossibly low rent and the promise of absolute solitude. The landlord, a...

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At thirteen, Marisol was obsessed with the supernatural. She devoured books on phantoms, watched documentaries on spectral phenomena, and begged her parents to take her to historic sites rumored to...

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The Lavender Room

When I was nine, my family moved into my grandmother’s old boarding house in the town of Ashwick, a place where the trees grew so thick they swallowed the streetlights...

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The Empty Setting

It wasn’t until the funeral was over and the casserole dishes were empty that the house seemed to exhale. Nora watched her mother’s friends drift through the kitchen like ghosts...

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The Silent Room

In the autumn of 2004, my family gathered at my grandfather’s dilapidated farmhouse in rural Kansas, a place out of time with its peeling wallpaper and creaking floors. Grandfather had...

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The Clockmaker’s Debt

The rain hadn’t stopped for three days, and the old farmhouse creaked like a ship at sea. I’d gathered my cousins and friends for a weekend of board games and...

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The Mirror’s Yield

My cousin Delia and I were six, the summer our mothers worked the late shift at the cannery. We stayed with our great-aunt Morgana in her crumbling farmhouse outside of...

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