Ghost stories from United States

The Third Weight

The first time it happened, I convinced myself it was a night terror. The second time, I blamed the new medication. But the third time, I knew something was in...

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The Last Broadcast of Channel 13

The summer I turned thirteen, my cousin Marcus and I were left to our own devices in my grandparents’ old farmhouse while they attended a funeral three counties over. The...

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The Man Who Smelled of Oranges

My grandmother, Abuela Elena, had come to stay with us for the summer, all the way from her little village in the mountains of Oaxaca. She was a tiny woman...

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The Hollow Hours

My grandmother on my mother’s side had a reputation in our small town of Bakersfield, not for fortune-telling, but for something far older and stranger. She kept a locked room...

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The Last Ember of Cerro Viejo

I was eleven the summer my mother took me to her childhood village, nestled in the folds of a mountain range that locals called Cerro Viejo, the Old Peak. The...

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The Hollow Wave

I grew up in the dusty outskirts of Barrow Creek, a town that clung to the highway like a burr on a dog’s tail. My grandfather, a man of few...

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The Ceiling of Ash

The first thing I noticed about the apartment at 15 Marrow Lane was the smell—a faint, sweet odor like overripe fruit left in a hot car. My roommate, Ellis, called...

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The Crying Ditch

In the arid outskirts of Las Cruces, New Mexico, where the desert meets the scrubland and the irrigation ditches run like veins through the hard earth, lived the Ortega family....

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The Mote in the Scheduler’s Eye

I’ve worked the night shift in the security hub of Pelican Bay Medical Center for eleven years. The job is mostly monotony: staring at a wall of screens that blink...

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The Water Knobs

In the autumn of 1987, my family rented a small, sagging farmhouse on the outskirts of a town that no longer exists. It was a temporary arrangement, a waypoint until...

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The Unraveling of the Holloway Homestead

My childhood in the Nebraska Sandhills was a tapestry of wide-open skies and whispering grasses, but the threads that wove the most enduring memories were those spun around the Holloway...

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The Lantern of the Long Dead

It began with a rusted key found in the floorboards of the old boathouse, not with any grand plan. My friends and I—Elena, Marcus, Theo, and I—were part of the...

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The Latch

The old farmhouse on Redemption Road had a latch on the inside of my bedroom door that my father had installed after I learned to work the round brass knob....

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The Cinder Box

It began with the kitchen clock. A tick that wasn’t ours, a rhythm that didn’t match the steady sweep of the second hand. We’d moved into the old farmhouse three...

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The Paint-Peeled Room

I never liked the room at the end of the upstairs hall in Aunt Cora’s farmhouse. The door was always slightly ajar, and the wallpaper peeled in long, brittle strips...

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The Unnumbered Rooms

I was twenty-one and needed money for the fall semester, so when my uncle got me a job as a textbook clerk for the district, I took it without thinking....

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The Salt Road Watcher

When my family relocated to the outskirts of Marrow Hollow, I expected silence and solitude, not the oppressive stillness that clung to our newly built prefab home. The house itself...

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The Stained Floorboard

I was six when we moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of Pella, Iowa. My parents thought the creaking floors and peeling wallpaper had character, but I knew...

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The Last Tenant

The last day of school in late May felt like a forgery. The sun was too bright, the air too sweet, and all I could think about was the sprawling...

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The Occupant of Bed 14

I never thought I’d find myself in this situation, but here I am, spending my nights at the Hillcrest Rest Home. I’m a night nurse, and I’ve been on this...

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The Latch

The first time I saw the latch, I was seven, standing at the foot of my grandmother’s cellar stairs. She had died the winter before, and my father had inherited...

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The Painted Lantern

The first time I heard the music, I thought it was the wind playing tricks on the rotted eaves of our rented farmhouse. But the tune was too deliberate, a...

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The Click of a Dead Switch

In October 2018, my wife, my two boys, and I moved into a rundown farmhouse on the edge of a vast, fog-shrouded cranberry bog in eastern Massachusetts. The house was...

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The Man in the Motorized Cart

At my friend Mara’s grandmother’s funeral, the air was thick with grief and the smell of lilies. After the burial, the family gathered at her Aunt Delia’s sprawling farmhouse for...

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