Ghost stories from United States

The Hollow Stones

On the last Saturday of August, through the heat-buckled back roads of rural Vermont, my family and I finally arrived at the site of the old Meridian Asylum. I’d begged...

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The Weight of the Watch

The shift at the canning factory had been brutal, the kind that left your ears ringing and your hands smelling of brine and metal. I got home to my basement...

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The Second Floor Tenant

I remember the day we moved into the bottom unit of the old triplex on Mallow Street. The place had been vacant for months, and the landlord was desperate to...

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The Ledger of the Last Hour

My name is Lila, and I’m part of a small paranormal team called SERAPH (Supernatural Explorers and Researchers of Anomalous Phenomena). Our latest case brought us to the Aldermere Benevolent...

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The Pale Corridor

I was born in the flat, sun-scorched lands of eastern New Mexico, in a town so small it didn’t appear on most maps. The name I won’t give, because the...

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The Empty Seat

The whir of the fluorescent light was the only sound in the sterile white room. I sat at a metal table, two chairs, no windows, just a door. I knew...

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The Static in the Walls

My grandmother’s farmhouse in rural Iowa had always creaked and groaned, but that night, every sound felt deliberate. I was there after my great-uncle Earl’s funeral, helping my mother sort...

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The Lantern in Her Palm

I never believed in the quiet sort of haunting until I stayed at my great-aunt Miriam’s farmhouse that autumn. The house was a relic of another century, with wide plank...

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The Linen Closet

The house on Maple Street was always just a house. A modest ranch with pale yellow siding and a porch that sagged slightly on the left, it was the kind...

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The Coal Man’s Visit

I was six when the knocking started. Not on the front door, but on the wall beside my bed, three slow thumps that never came at the same time of...

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The Porcelain Doll in the Blue Room

My name is Eliza, and I’ve always had a thirst for the unknown. It’s the reason I took up tarot reading in the first place, much to my grandmother’s dismay....

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The Grating of the Gears

I never believed in the supernatural. Not really. I thought ghosts were just a way for our minds to cope with grief or fear. Then I moved into the old...

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The Basement of Olive Street

In the autumn of 2001, Margaret and I had just moved into a converted Victorian house on Olive Street in a sleepy town in upstate New York. The house was...

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The Anniversary Clock

Marta and Elias had been married for twelve years, and their anniversary had always been a private ritual, a quiet celebration of their shared history. This year, they had chosen...

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The Blue Thread of the Loom

I was eleven when the first thread came loose. It happened on a Tuesday, during my grandmother’s funeral. Not her death—that had been a quiet, expected thing, like the last...

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A Late Night Visit

I was just reading, ” A sea of voices in the night” by Ant 1111. You know, that story brings back a memory of something that happened when I was...

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The Palette of Unraveling

When the first shadow slid across the wallpaper, I thought it was just the old house settling. But then it moved against the draft, and I knew. It wasn’t a...

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The Ceramic River

The first time I saw the ceramic river, I was seven, standing at the edge of the playground while the other kids played tag. It wasn’t water that flowed past...

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The Saltwood Ledger

Between the ages of five and nine, I sometimes felt a cold draft in my bedroom, even with the windows shut and the radiator hissing. A weight would settle at...

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The Third Invitation

Mara lived alone in a studio apartment on the fourth floor of an old building that smelled of dust and slow decay. The unit had one window, facing a brick...

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The Lavender Room

In 2007, I was a seventeen-year-old boy named Caleb, lying on my bed in our cramped apartment above my mother’s bakery, listening to a burned mix CD on my Discman....

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The Hollow Laugh

The evening had started with a sense of reckless freedom, the kind that comes with the last Friday before finals. I was in my cramped dorm, a converted basement on...

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The Keeper of the Ledger

I was a night auditor for the Clearwater County Sheriff’s Office, pulling the graveyard shift in a town that rolled up its sidewalks after nine. My name is Deputy Mara...

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The Corner Listener

The move back to Cedar Hill felt like a step backward in time. After five years of Florida’s humidity and citrus, the dry Texas heat and the endless stretch of...

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