Ghost stories from United States

The Cape at the End of the Hall

Evelyn had always hated the hallway of their new flat. It stretched from the living room to the bedroom like a dark throat, with a single overhead bulb that flickered...

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The Grain of the Walls

In the autumn of 2007, I traded the ceaseless din of Chicago for a silent patch of land in western Kansas, near the town of Hoxie. My parents had bought...

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The Cleaver in the Pines

Maya and I were doing our usual laps around the old gravel track that hugged the tree line. The autumn air was crisp, carrying the smell of damp leaves and...

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The Green Pea Incident

My name is Elara, and I’m sixteen. Since we moved into this old farmhouse on the edge of Morrow’s Hollow, things have been… off. Not just strange, but specific. Every...

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The Fourth Visit

My friend Marcus has always been a little off. Not in a bad way, but in a way that makes you uneasy. He’s died three times, or so he says....

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The Loft in the Hill

When I was eight, my family spent weekends at the old Millbrook place, a sprawling farm owned by our friends, the Hardings. We’d arrive early, when the dew still clung...

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The Weft and the Warp

The summer I turned sixteen, my cousin Lila and I spent our days in my grandmother’s defunct weaving mill, which she’d converted into an apartment. The mill’s machinery had long...

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The Fever That Left

It was the autumn of my twelfth year when we moved into the old house on Birch Lane. My mother, my younger brother Leo, and I had come to live...

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The Inheritance of Static

My grandmother, Elowen, was the only one who ever believed me. When I was a child, I’d sit on the peeling linoleum floor of her kitchen, tracing the pattern of...

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The Constant Refrain

The summer heat clung to the brick walls of my apartment like a second skin. I had taken the place for its proximity to the city’s music archives, a musty...

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The Photograph in the Attic

It was the summer of 2004, and my nieces, Lily and Sophie, were playing in my old attic bedroom. The house had been in our family for generations, and the...

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The Keepsake Under the Dust

The blue house at the end of Culver Lane had a particular hum in its floorboards, a sound like a trapped bee vibrating beneath the linoleum. It wasn’t a constant...

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The Porch Light That Never Went Out

I moved into the house on Cedar Lane in the fall of 2014, when I was nine. It was a two-story Victorian with a wraparound porch, the kind you see...

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The Kettle’s Long Whistle

Marta had lived in the old farmhouse for eighteen months before the first oddity. She’d expected something sooner, given her history—three of her last four homes had thrown spectral tantrums....

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The Unpaused Game

In the autumn of 2011, I was at my friend Danny’s house, a sprawling Victorian relic on the edge of our small town. Danny and our other friend, Leo, were...

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The Saltwater Promise

I was seven, the summer my parents rented a cottage on Lake Marrow, a name that should have warned us. The water was a deep, unnatural green, and even in...

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The Weight in the Walls

The first time I felt it, I thought it was just a bad dream. I woke up in the middle of the night, not fully awake, but aware that something...

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The Static in the Walls

In the autumn of 2006, at twelve, I moved with my mother and grandmother into my great-grandmother’s peeling Victorian house at the edge of a dying orchard. Great-Grandma Elsie was...

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The Red Barn Murmurs

I have kept this locked in my chest for twenty years, never speaking it aloud beyond the walls of my own mind. I’m a retired schoolteacher now, living alone in...

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The Pawnshop Television

The house at 13 Carrowmore Lane had always felt watchful, but never outright hostile—until the morning the television in my son’s room switched itself on. I was in the living...

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The Lobby of Forgotten Hours

In the sweltering summer of 1987, I turned thirteen and was finally allowed to watch the film that had haunted my dreams for years—a romantic ghost story set in a...

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The Bone Orchard

I had a friend, Dale, who worked at a crematorium and moonlighted as a stand-up comic. ‘Laughing in the face of death,’ he’d say, ‘keeps the other gig from eating...

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The Red Lanterns of Gull’s Perch

The first year out of boot camp, I was twenty years old and dumb as a bag of hammers. My buddies and I—all of us fresh from the Great Lakes...

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The Last Coal

I was twelve when my grandfather, Elias, finally gave up the ghost. He was a man of few words, but those words were heavy as the coal he’d hauled from...

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