Ghost stories from United States

The Lantern of the Unspoken

We had lived in the old farmhouse for nearly a decade before the first sign that we were not alone. It was a place of creaking timbers and peeling wallpaper,...

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The Papered Window

I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m just telling you what happened. I was twenty, sharing a cramped second-floor flat with my cousin Mira, trying to scrape through university...

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The Sifting Shed

I was twelve when we moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of a town that had more corn than people. My name is Eli, and my mom had...

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The Last Picket

The autumn of 1988 had painted the hills of northern Hardy County in shades of rust and gold. I was driving alone on a narrow, winding road that cut through...

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The Third Floor Landing

I never thought much about the layout of our new house, a narrow Victorian with a split staircase that curved like a serpent’s spine. The third floor was mostly unused,...

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The Cloth and the Smoke

In the autumn of that year, the air turned cold early, and the leaves on the oaks around the farmhouse fell in a single night, as if a hand had...

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Indian Boy

This is my first story, and I feel a little bit nervous (probably because it’s at night, and I usually forbid myself to read ghost stories at night) about sharing...

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The Static Garden

The first time it happened, I blamed the old wiring. Our house, a creaking Victorian relic on the edge of Maplewood, was notorious for flickering lights and moody appliances. I...

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The Hour of the Salt Wind

It was one of those nights when sleep lets go without warning, and you float in the dark, tethered to nothing. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, feeling the...

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The Constant Attic Creak

My grandmother’s house is a mausoleum of creaking floorboards and stale air. It used to be a funeral home, but now it’s just a museum of grief, with rooms full...

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The Ashwood Frame

The Thorne house had stood on Cedar Lane since 1931, a respectable brick colonial with white trim and a porch that sagged like a tired smile. My parents bought it...

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The Hollow Ticker

When the Peralta family moved into the old farmhouse on Cedar Ridge, they knew it needed work. The paint peeled like sunburned skin, the porch sagged, and the wind had...

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The Copper Dial

It started as a joke. My friend Maya had downloaded some ghost-hunting app on her phone, and we were bored at her grandmother’s old house in the Mojave Desert. The...

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The Lantern’s Keeper

I was twenty-three when I moved into the Holloway House, an old Victorian that had been converted into a boarding house for those of us who couldn’t quite afford better....

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The Open Locket

My name is Adrian, and my wife, Elena, and I have always prided ourselves on our rationality. We were both scientists, trained to seek empirical evidence and dismiss the supernatural...

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The Lantern Keeper

In the fall of 2012, I had been documenting strange light anomalies in and around my rural property, a converted schoolhouse on the edge of Blackwood Marsh. My camera had...

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The Last Train to Hollow Creek

I never believed in ghosts, not really. Not until the night I saw Lena standing on the platform at Hollow Creek station, her dress soaked through, her eyes black as...

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The Bloom and the Swarm

Mara had a gift, or so her grandmother called it. The old woman would pat her hand and say, ‘You draw them in, child. The unseen ones. They like your...

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The Staring Boy

I never meant to die that Tuesday. I just wanted the noise to stop—the constant hum of the city, the chatter in my head, the weight of debts I couldn’t...

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The Weight of the Unborn

I never believed in ghosts, not really. I thought I was a rational person, someone who could explain away the creaks and groans of an old house with drafts and...

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The Painted Circle

When we first moved into the old farmhouse on Hemlock Road, I knew something was off. The outside was charming—white siding, a wraparound porch, and a big red barn out...

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The Static Between Stations

The alarm clock read 6:47 AM. Outside, the November dark clung to the frost-rimmed windows of my third-floor apartment in Duluth, a city of iron and lake-haze. My father’s voice...

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The Clock at 2:14

Marta had always been a light sleeper, but it wasn’t until she moved into the old Victorian house on Hemlock Lane that she began to dread the night. The house...

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The Locked Room at the End of the Hall

In the summer I turned nine, we moved into my grandmother’s house at the end of a crumbling gravel road. The house had been in our family since before the...

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