Ghost stories from Alabama

The Iron Bird and the Weeping Walls

I grew up in Bitterroot, a town so small that the county map printed it in a font smaller than the veins on a dried leaf. The nearest city was...

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The Last Visit

I was lying on my bed, the glow of my phone screen illuminating the dark room, when I felt it—a cold prickle at the back of my neck. I looked...

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The Keepsake

The drive from the dusty Kansas flatlands to my grandparents’ cabin in the Cascade foothills was a blur of heat and boredom. My little brother, Danny, sat rigid in the...

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The Boiling Point

In the heart of the Appalachian foothills, where the hollers run deep and the trees claw at the sky, stood the old Merriweather place. It had been abandoned for decades,...

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The Stillness in the Living Room

I’ve never been one to believe in the supernatural, not fully. But what happened that rainy Tuesday afternoon in our apartment on Mulberry Lane changed everything. My mother, a woman...

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The Collector of Unfinished Melodies

The old music box sat on the mantelpiece, a silent sentinel in Elias’s otherwise quiet apartment. It had belonged to his Aunt Lenora, a woman whose life had been a...

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The Old Clock on the Wall

My grandfather passed away a few years back, but I feel his presence remains in our home. We still have his favorite clock hanging in the living room. My cousin...

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The Night the Lantern Winked

When I was seven, my baby tooth finally wiggled free, and I was certain the Mouse King would come. In our village of Marrow Falls, it wasn’t a fairy who...

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The Appaloosa in the Attic

My maternal grandmother, Nonna, used to say that the veil between worlds was thin in old houses, especially ones with bones in the walls. I never gave it much thought...

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The Molten Breath of Winter

In the heart of the rust-belt city of Mercer, where glass towers and gleaming dealerships now crowd the riverfront, there remains a relic of an older, grimmer age: the Ironwood...

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The Card of the Goat

My grandmother passed when I was six, and grief wrapped around me like a cold, wet shroud. I remember that afternoon, the light in my room a dull amber through...

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The Thumping in the Wall

I never thought much of the crawlspace beneath our new house. It was just a dusty, cramped hole under the stairs where we shoved old Christmas decorations and forgotten photo...

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The House of Broken Cadence

My best friend, Celia, and I met in the sixth grade at St. Aloysius Elementary. She was an only child, living with her mother in a cramped apartment. When her...

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Return Of The Dead

I have no idea if it’s his spirit or ghost, but every night, 2:15 am exactly, I wake up to my long dead dog, Charlie, standing in the doorway of...

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The Hollow Hum

We moved into the old farmhouse in early spring, when the mud on the lane was still soft and the fields around us were bare. I was six, and my...

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Sapphire Eyes and the Greenhouse

I never thought I’d believe in ghosts. Not really. My mother always said I had her gift, the one that made her stop mid-sentence to stare at a corner of...

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The Cold Stain on the Tile

I used to work the closing shift at a twenty-four-hour laundromat off the interstate, a place called Spin Cycle. It wasn’t much to look at: rows of washers and dryers,...

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The Board’s Mimicry

When the seasons balanced between humid and chill, I’d slip down to the basement after everyone else had gone to bed. It was a concrete cave, unfinished, with a washer...

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The Lantern in the Root Cellar

The summer I turned eleven, my mother, our two mutts, and I moved from Atlanta to the edge of a town called Coldharbor, where the streets were lined with dying...

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The Carpenter’s Mark

I never believed in ghosts. Not until I inherited my great-aunt’s house in the hollows of West Virginia, a place so damp the air tasted of moss and rust. The...

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The Frequency of the Forgotten

Marlowe had always been drawn to the macabre, not with a morbid obsession but with a quiet fascination. She devoured books on folklore and obscure paranormal phenomena, and her nights...

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The Soot That Settles

Elena never thought she’d return to her grandmother’s farmhouse. The place had always felt wrong, even as a child, with its creaking timbers and the constant smell of damp earth....

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The Cobalt Debt

The day we drove the presence out of Hartley House, I thought we’d won. The sage smoke curled around the doorframes, and Ma’s voice, hoarse from chanting, finally faded into...

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The Weight of Stillness

In the quiet hours of the night, I lay in my tiny apartment in the city of Meridian, a place where the hum of traffic never truly ceased but seemed...

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