Ghost stories from Alabama

The Marble Foyer

I had never felt pain like that before. It was a hot July afternoon in the town of Millbrook, and I was fifteen, sprawled on the pavement outside the old...

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The Apron in the Woods

The Carrow family arrived at the old farmhouse in the middle of a rain-slicked autumn. The house had stood empty for nearly a decade, its clapboard siding gray with age,...

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The Porcelain Garden

The summer I turned twelve, the heat lay over our valley like a fever, and the crickets sang their endless, droning song. We’d moved to the old vineyard country when...

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The Light in the Garden

For twenty-two years, I’ve lived with the invisible—not as a ghost hunter, but as someone who feels the static of otherness in rooms where others feel only silence. It’s like...

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The Kiln House

When my grandfather first laid eyes on the property, it was a scorched patch of earth at the edge of the town, bordered by a dying oak and a creek...

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The Hollow Staircase

The old farmhouse on Cedar Lane had stood since the Civil War, its thick stone walls holding whispers of a century and a half of lives. I’d claimed the upstairs...

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The Hollow Knock

I’m Mara, and for the past eight months, my family and I have lived in a creaking farmhouse at the edge of the Pines, a dense forest that’s been here...

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The Pale Boy in the Storm

The summer of 2014 was supposed to be a lazy stretch of lemonade and cicadas, but for me, it became a season of unshakable dread. I lived in a creaky...

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The March Snow of ’93

I never knew my mother. Not really. Just a few blurry photos and the heavy silence that hung around her name. My grandparents raised me from the time I was...

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The Falling Planter

In the autumn of 2012, my uncle Isaac passed away after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He had been staying in our spare room, which we converted into a...

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The Lighthouse Keeper’s Ledger

I’ve never spoken of the winter I spent at the Porthallow Point Lighthouse, not even to my sister, and I’ve vowed to take the truth to my grave. It’s not...

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The Quilted Stillness

Marta had always found comfort in the rhythmic hum of the old farmhouse, the way the wind off the prairie made the windowpanes shudder, and the smell of dry hay...

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The Kept Door

Mara had worked the graveyard shift at St. Jude’s, a sprawling complex that felt more like a forgotten maze than a hospital, for eight years. On the third floor, the...

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The Ward of Persistent Hums

The old Winslow County Infirmary had been a tuberculosis camp before the Great War, then a proper hospital, and finally a kind of halfway house for the forgotten. I started...

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The Cartridge That Remembers

My girlfriend, Dana, and I—Marcus—had been counting down the days to that Saturday. University had swallowed our summer whole, and the only thing keeping us sane was the promise of...

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The Rusty Merry-Go-Round

My name is Eli, and I’ve spent all sixteen years of my life in the dusty outskirts of Terral, Oklahoma. Most folks think a kid like me has no business...

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The Loam and the Lantern

The year I turned six, we moved into my grandmother’s farmhouse, a sagging white structure with a porch that listed like a tired ship. My sister, Elara, was barely four,...

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The Doorway of Ash

In the autumn of 1987, my mother, Clara, was twenty-one, living in a cramped duplex on the outskirts of Baton Rouge. My father, Mark, worked the graveyard shift at a...

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The Blue Couch Incident

My cousin Neil had a blue couch. It was a heavy, old-fashioned thing, the kind that swallows you whole when you sit down, and it lived in the basement of...

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The Static Between Stations

My name is Elara, and I don’t talk about what happened in the autumn of my ninth year. But I’ve found this forum, and maybe strangers on the internet can...

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The Weight of the Third Shift

Marta had always prided herself on her resilience. Working the night shift at the All-Nite Chemist, a squat, fluorescent-lit box of a building on the outskirts of the city, had...

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The Wandering Pane

My cousin Marta and I had driven six hours to visit our friend June, who had just moved into a crumbling brick apartment complex on the edge of a dying...

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The Grandfather Clock’s Last Tick

I never thought I’d inherit more than my grandfather’s pocket watch, but after he passed, I found myself living alone in his rustic cabin nestled deep in the Hemlock Woods....

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The Floorboard Giggler

In the spring of 2019, my partner Alex and I bought our first condo in the historic district of Millbrook. The place had character, but the floors were a mess—scratched...

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