Ghost stories from United States

The Painted Laughter

It was a muggy August afternoon when my cousin Julia and I agreed to watch my six-year-old niece, Mia, while my parents attended a late lunch. Their old Victorian house...

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The Cold Typewriter

I never believed in ghosts until I moved into the old farmhouse on Hemlock Road. The place had been empty for years, and the realtor just gave me a nervous...

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The Waking Pattern

I didn’t think much of the old farmhouse when we moved in. It was cheap, and the landlord was desperate. The previous tenants had left in a hurry, according to...

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The Carpet’s Constellations

The night air in my inherited flat above the old map shop carried the scent of aged paper and dust that never quite settled. I had been cataloging the previous...

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The Weight of Ledger

The house on Hemlock Lane had stood since 1947, its brick facade darkened by decades of rain and soot. Milo and his mother moved in with his stepfather, Gordon, a...

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The Boy in the Garden

My family moved into the old farmhouse when I was twelve, and my mother, a painter, was thrilled by the overgrown garden and the way the light slanted through the...

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The Cellar of the Hungry Root

The summer I turned twelve, my parents sent me to stay with my Aunt Rosa and Uncle Carl at their new place in the hills of West Virginia. They’d bought...

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The Left-Hand Caress

The clanking of the furnace was the only sound in the half-finished basement, that and the tinny digital riffs of the game. Our guitars, cheap plastic things, were slung over...

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The Salt Creek Annex

The summer I turned eleven, my family moved to the outskirts of a small Nebraska town, into a neighborhood that had been carved out of the prairie in the 1950s....

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The Padlock’s Rattle

The day Dad left on his long-haul trucking run, the house settled into its usual rhythm. Mom would leave for her shift at the cannery by 4:00 AM, and the...

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The Thermometer Cracks

In the late autumn of 1987, my father, a long-haul trucker named Dale, was hauling a load of frozen poultry from a processing plant in Boise to a distributor in...

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The Lullaby of Static

Elliot hadn’t slept well in weeks. The new apartment, a cramped studio in a converted warehouse, was supposed to be a fresh start after his breakup, but the old building...

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The Long Hair at the Foot of the Bed

After his father sold the old funeral parlor on Summit Avenue, my partner Marcus and I rented a modest apartment in the quieter part of Duluth. We’d been there for...

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The Lantern in the Yard

The night air was heavy with the scent of damp earth and blooming jasmine, a fragrance that clung to the small bungalow like a second skin. My name is Elara,...

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The Lantern’s Debt

The old fisherman’s cottage on the cliff above Dunmore Bay had been in my family for three generations. I’d come there to escape the city, to find some quiet after...

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The Hummingbird Room

June had barely begun when we rolled up to the place, and already the air smelled of cut grass and something else, something sweet and wrong, like fruit left too...

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The Stitch in the Wall

The old Victorian house on Bramblewick Lane had always creaked and groaned, but that night, the sounds were different. Lena, a night-shift nurse who had just moved in, couldn’t sleep....

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The Wallpaper Bloom

I was seven when we moved into the ground-floor flat on the edge of the old mill district. The building had once been a textile factory, and the apartment was...

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The Curl of the Cistern

Every Saturday, Mira woke before dawn to tame her stubbornly straight hair. The apartment’s only mirror that wasn’t fogged or cracked hung in the laundry room, above a chipped porcelain...

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The Midnight Kitchen of Cedar Hollow

My childhood home sat on the edge of Cedar Hollow, a town so small it didn’t appear on most maps. The house itself was a relic, built in the 1870s...

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The Hollow Watch

The summer cottage sat at the edge of Lake Arden, its wooden porch groaning under the weight of a half-remembered past. My grandmother, Mabel, and my mother, June, had driven...

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The Weight of the Unseen

Maren had lived in the old Vermont farmhouse her entire life, all twenty-six years. It was a sprawling, drafty structure built in 1892, with walls that smelled of damp wood...

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The Painted Heron

I was twelve when my grandmother gave me the old camera. It was a heavy, brass-plated thing with a bellows that breathed in and out like a tired animal. She...

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The Lantern Keeper

My buddy Jake and I decided to hunt for bluegill on the old dredge pond outside of Millbrook, a place known for its overgrown banks and the kind of quiet...

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