Ghost stories from United States

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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The Hollow Man in the Spare Room

The house on Meridian Lane had always creaked in ways that felt deliberate, as if it were testing the weight of each footstep. When I moved in with my daughter,...

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The Tally Mark in the Wet Paint

My friend Margo and I were deep in a late-night chat on an old forum we’d both joined years ago. She lived in a creaky farmhouse on the edge of...

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The Crossing Room

The moment I stepped through the front door of the farmhouse, I knew something was wrong. It wasn’t the peeling paint or the way the floorboards groaned under my boots,...

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The Folded Clothes

The old house on Bramble Lane had a way of holding its breath. I remember the summer I turned nine, when the air inside our rented rooms felt thicker than...

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The Painted Veil

The first time I saw the thing in our apartment, I blamed it on the poor lighting and my exhaustion from working the night shift at the 24-hour grocery on...

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The Ledger of Static

I know no one will believe me, but I have to write this down before it’s too late. My name is Mara, and I live in a crumbling apartment building...

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The Wake of the Gilded Seam

The Bexley house had stood at the edge of the marsh for over a century, its bones soaked with salt and sorrow. I’d rented it for the summer, drawn by...

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