Ghost stories from United States

The Bone Bridge

The summer of ’87 was sticky and hot, and my wife Lila and I had fled the city for my mother’s farmhouse in the hills of West Virginia. I’d promised...

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The Journey to Forgotten Places

I took Ava to visit my aunt one autumn weekend. I can’t recall the exact year, but it was sometime in the late ’80s. My aunt lived in a small...

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The Bloom of the Amber Stain

The air in the dilapidated barn hung thick and cloying, a testament to years of undisturbed decay. Amelia tightened her grip on her flashlight, its beam cutting a weak swathe...

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The Last Gasp of the Coral Bell

On the third of November, 2019, the night nurse’s voice crackled through the phone, telling us that our aunt Miriam wouldn’t see the dawn. We drove through the rain-slicked streets...

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The Lace-Faced Visitor

I never thought I’d see one with my own eyes. Ghosts were for grainy photographs and late-night campfire tales, not for a rational woman like me. But that was before...

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Poltergeist at my Sisters

This story isn’t about me. This happened to my sister, Stef and her husband, Pat, and is still going on. I am terribly afraid for both of them. My brother-in-law...

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The Frosted Window

In 2008, my nephew, Toby, was five years old when our great-aunt, whom he had never met, passed away. We lived in the small town of Ashford, nestled between a...

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The Pantry’s Reckoning

At sixteen, I thought I knew fear—the kind that comes from a poorly lit hallway or a creaking floorboard. But nothing prepared me for the winter my family moved into...

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The Frozen Mother and the White Child

I was only eight, and my cousin Maya was nine. She lived in a neat little town outside of Wilmington, in a modest two-story condo that sat on a quiet...

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The Hollow Click

In the autumn of that year, I moved into a small apartment on the third floor of an old brick building, the kind with long, dim hallways and radiators that...

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The Basement Keeper

When I turned twelve, my family moved from the dusty plains of Kansas to a small coastal town in Maine. I was angry about leaving my friends, and the old...

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The Dispatcher’s Call

I’ve been staying with my aunt in her old farmhouse for the past few months, trying to get back on my feet. The place is drafty and the stairs creak,...

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The Mirror of Sorrow

In the fading light of a late autumn evening, Marcus finished tidying up the cramped apartment he shared with his sister’s son, little Adam. The building, an old converted warehouse...

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The Cinder Room

The old house on Mulberry Lane had a way of holding its breath. I noticed it the first time we walked through, my wife Elena’s hand pressed against the small...

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The Constant Rap

The first time I heard it, I was drowning in the static of a dead channel. The CRT television in my room was a relic, a bulky obsidian block that...

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The Well of Waking Stones

The summer I turned sixteen, my best friend Mara and I spent most of our days at the old Proctor place. It was a dilapidated farmhouse at the end of...

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The Flicker at the Linen Closet

The year was 1997, and I was nine years old. My mother and I were staying at my great-aunt Mildred’s house, a sprawling Victorian with a turret that leaned like...

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The Cadence of Dust

The summer I turned nineteen, I spent a languid weekend at my friend Eli’s family farm in the Virginia Piedmont. Eli’s grandfather, a stooped man named Amos, had recently passed,...

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The Weight in the Walls

The house on Hemlock Lane had a personality, and it wasn’t a friendly one. From the moment we moved in, I felt it—a heaviness in the air, like the rooms...

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The Keeper of the Spindle

My fascination with the unseen began in childhood, when I’d catch flickers of figures at the edge of my vision. By my teens, I’d devoured every tome on spectral phenomena,...

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The Watcher at 221B Elm

Mara first noticed the man when she was eight, the summer her family moved to the cul-de-sac of Maple Grove. He stood beneath the old oak tree at the edge...

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The Lattice of Birch and Bone

Two weeks before the final bell, Mr. Ashford herded our senior class into the old Whitmore Estate for what he called ‘a chance to clear the static before the storm...

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The Last Quarter

The autumn term at Westbrook High had a way of swallowing the daylight by four in the afternoon. The parking lot was mostly empty when my friend Marcus and I...

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The Constant Gardener

My name is Elias Thorne, and I am seventeen. I have seen things that would curdle the blood of grown men, things that have no place in the waking world....

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