Ghost stories from Alabama

The Atlas Protocol

I never thought the night shift at the Meridian Data Center would land me in the middle of a supernatural event, but last Friday, at 2:47 AM, I saw something...

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The Glass Casket of Mulberry Creek

I never believed in ghosts until I moved into the old farmhouse on Mulberry Creek. The place had been empty for years, and the realtor warned me about the drafty...

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The Barrens of Red Creek

The summer of ’09 was a furnace, the kind that cracked the earth and turned the air to glass. Our house sat at the edge of Red Creek, a dried-up...

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The Cobalt Room

The house on Leeward Lane was a two-story Victorian with a peeling white facade and a porch that sagged like a tired spine. My wife, Clara, and I bought it...

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The Gears of the Foundry

My name is Clara, and I live in Wheeling, West Virginia. There’s an old glass factory down by the river, the kind that’s been rusting since the ’40s. My friend...

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The Last Lantern

My first taste of the impossible came when I was six, on a sheep farm tucked into the rolling hills of Vermont. Now, at fifty-three, that night remains as sharp...

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The Weave of the Hollow Loom

The gift, or curse, of seeing beyond the veil had been with me since childhood. I could feel the cold spots in warm rooms, hear the faint static of voices...

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The Cartographer’s Debt

The last thing I did before lying down was trace the blue lines of the map my grandfather left me. It was a hand-drawn chart of the marshland behind his...

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The Flicker at the Landing

At twelve, my greatest triumph was being the sole occupant of our house for an evening. My sister had sleepover commitments, and my parents were out at a dinner party...

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The Man Who Swallowed a Storm

The rain came down in sheets over the parking lot of the Cedar Ridge Mall, drumming a frantic rhythm on the asphalt. I stood under the thin awning of the...

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The Trembling Slab

The family plot lay in a bowl of hills, a place where the fog pooled like cold milk and the trees leaned in as if listening. It was divided into...

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The Intermittent Lamp

The last band practice had ended around midnight, and the four of us—Mara on vocals, Ethan on guitar, Lucas on bass, and myself, Devon, on drums—decided it was time to...

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The Last Delivery of Gable & Sons

The town of Ashford Hollow had been a speck on the map even before the interstate bypassed it, but by the time my cousin and I found it, the name...

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The Night at Hollow Grove

One summer evening, my aunt took me, my brother, my cousin, and my other aunt to an ancient cemetery hidden deep within the woods. It was a night filled with...

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The Four Corners of Jonas Pike

It was a summer night in the hollow, the kind where the heat pressed down like a wet blanket and the only relief was the wind that didn’t come. My...

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The Hollow Bark

I remember that night clearly, the way the house settled into its late-night quiet, the hum of the refrigerator a distant heartbeat. I was in the bathroom, brushing my teeth,...

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The Sunlit Doorway

The house on Hemlock Lane was always a little too quiet, as if it held its breath when we weren’t looking. My brothers and I—I was thirteen, Theo was nine,...

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The Night the Crockery Rattled

It began the summer I turned twelve, in the house our family rented at the edge of a dying town. The sun baked the streets to a pale gold, and...

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The Copper Kettle’s Toll

I’d always prided myself on being a rational man. Ghosts, spirits, the paranormal—all of it was fodder for late-night television, not for a civil engineer with a steady job and...

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The Pale Ferryman

I was twelve that winter, two weeks before Christmas, and the blizzard had buried our cabin so deep that my window was a porthole into a swirling white void. I...

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The Figure in the Frost

I was ten years old when the winter shadows began to move. It happened a week before my birthday, deep in the heart of a cold December. I was lying...

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Warning Signs And Peculiar Visitors

It was the spring of 2001, and quite frankly, I was in a job that I hated at a local community college. My immediate supervisor was a red-faced, shrewish man...

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The Lantern’s Last Hour

I work the overnight shift at a state correctional facility out in the high desert of New Mexico, where the wind never stops and the stars are so sharp they...

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The Keeper of the Last Light

I was nine when the lighthouse on Raven’s Point went dark for the first time in sixty years. My great-uncle, Silas, had been its keeper since before I was born,...

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