Ghost stories from Alabama

The Man in the Linen Closet

I grew up in the dusty, sun-bleached town of Red Hollow, New Mexico, a place where the old coal mines had long been abandoned but the stories never seemed to...

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The Stained Glass Codex

The town of Millbrook had been dying for so long that no one remembered it was ever alive. The old downtown, now just a hollow grid of cracked sidewalks and...

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The Kitchen Clock

The winter of 1991 in the town of Millbrook was a season of long, brittle nights. I was nine, living with my father and his new wife, Carol, in a...

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The Concrete Lullaby

The old Conklin Bridge had been a landmark in our county for decades, but by the time I was nineteen, it was nothing more than a forgotten relic. The county...

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The Undertaker’s Gift

The autumn of 2007 had been unseasonably warm, but by the time October bled into November, the chill had settled into the bones of the old farmhouse like a permanent...

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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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The Static Guest

The summer of 2014 found me in a rented bungalow on the outskirts of a dried-up lake town in Nevada, where the heat shimmered off the cracked asphalt like a...

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The Porch Light

The umber dusk of August 3rd settled over the pine woods of southern Alabama like a wet blanket. I sat on the porch swing of the house my wife and...

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This was a place of iron and fire, not of spirits

The Mill at Ravensbruck had been silent for thirty years, but the rust and grime could not hide the sheer scale of the place. We’d come for the Autumn Festival,...

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The Hollow Field

The old farmhouse had a way of holding onto sounds. I’d lie in bed at night, the floorboards groaning like they were remembering footsteps, the wind finding cracks in the...

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The Hundred-Year Gap

The van rattled down the gravel road, headlights cutting through a fog that seemed to have no business being there in late August. Our group, the Spectral Inquiry Society, had...

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The Mannequin in Ward C

I was a night janitor at the Meridian Medical Research Center, a sprawling complex on the edge of the city that mostly emptied after 11 p.m. My shift ended at...

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The Last Bell at Hollow Creek

The winter had locked the valley in a brittle silence, and my friends—Mara, Devin, Ezra, and I—needed a break from the boredom of our small town. We’d heard the old...

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The Last Hum

Marta had convinced herself that the whole ordeal was a product of exhaustion. Six months in the new apartment, and the city’s constant rumble had played tricks on her. The...

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The Porcelain Jester

In the summer of 1986, when I was nine, my parents and I went to stay with Great-Aunt Helga in her old farmhouse in rural Vermont. Helga was a reclusive...

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The Empty Couch

I was curled up in the worn armchair by the bay window, the last of the afternoon sun slanting across the pages of a dog-eared mystery. My portable CD player...

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The Clockwork Hum

I never minded the long drive to my grandmother’s house, even though the last ten miles twisted through pine forests so dense they swallowed the sun. The house itself, a...

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The Perpetual Draft

In the late autumn of 1995, I was the night watchman at the Marigold Grand, a once-grand casino that had seen better decades. My rounds took me through the opulent...

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The Lantern’s Frequency

When our band, The Hollow Pines, started renting the old mill house at the edge of Reed Creek, we thought the seclusion was perfect for late-night jam sessions. The nearest...

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The Hollow Click

On the night of October 12th, 2019, I returned to my apartment in the old Meridian building, a relic from the 1920s with its creaking floors and radiators that clanked...

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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 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 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 Closet at the Top of the Stairs

We moved into the old Victorian house on Maplewood Lane in the fall of 2003. It was a sprawling place with gables and a wrap-around porch, and my wife Lena...

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