Ghost stories from Arizona

The Hollow Nursery

The drive back from St. Jude’s was a blur of grey highways and flickering streetlights. I’d spent three weeks in that sterile ward, watching my daughter Mira fight a fever...

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The Kneeling Figure in the Corner

Ever since I was a child, the dark has been my adversary. My mother would sit on the edge of my bed, her hand on my forehead, until my breathing...

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The Tug of the Porous Boy

On a damp October evening, I was waiting with my colleague, Mira, at the automated tram stop near the old industrial district. We had just finished a late shift at...

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The Runner in the Static

When I was seven, we lived in a place called Cedar Hollow, a small subdivision carved out of the Arizona desert. The houses were all the same, with beige stucco...

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The Woman in the Window

I’ve never been one to dismiss the things that go bump in the night, but I also never expected to see what I saw that summer. My name is Elara,...

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The Lamp Post Lattice

In the autumn of 1987, when I was six, we lived in a rented house on Alder Street. My bedroom faced the back, overlooking a narrow yard that dead-ended into...

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The Desert Toll

The summer I turned fourteen, my family moved to the edge of the Mojave, where the sun bleached everything to bone and the wind never stopped its dry whispering through...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Return

The first time I saw her, I was seven, standing at the window of my grandmother’s farmhouse, watching the rows of corn shiver in the wind. A black shape stood...

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The Lantern in the Corn

I never believed in the old stories about the corn, not until that summer when my little brother, Samuel, started talking about the light. We lived in a farmhouse in...

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The Static in the Attic

It was a Tuesday, just past midnight, and the old farmhouse creaked like a ship at sea. I was in the study, hunched over my laptop, trying to finish a...

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The Chain That Snapped

On Saturday, October 3rd, 2009, at around seven in the evening, I sat down to dinner with my family. I was nineteen, and my parents had launched into a detailed...

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The Gilded Cage

The first time I saw the girl in the attic room, I was unpacking a box of my grandmother’s old lace handkerchiefs. The house we’d moved into, a sprawling Victorian...

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The Static Guest

I never believed in ghosts. Even after what I saw, I still don’t. But that doesn’t mean I can explain it. My name is Marcus, and my wife Lena and...

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The Folded Clothes

The old house on Bramble Lane had a way of holding its breath. I remember the summer I turned nine, when the air inside our rented rooms felt thicker than...

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The Loam of the Hollow Oak

On the last day of September in 1994, my sister and I stood in the dusty hollow of the old Murkwood house, which we’d inherited from a great-aunt we barely...

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The Jogger in the Hall

In the autumn of 2008, I was eight months pregnant with my first child, a girl we planned to name Amelia. We lived in a sprawling Victorian house my husband...

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The Last of the Moth-Dry Boxes

I was twelve when we moved to the Flats, a wide, wind-scoured basin east of the Continental Divide, where the sky pressed down like a slab of slate and the...

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The Locked Greenhouse

I first met Eli at a roadside diner off Route 9, where the coffee tasted like burnt tire and the pie was a gamble. He was the kind of quiet...

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The Lantern’s Last Gasp

It was the tail end of a bitter winter at the St. Austell Lighthouse, where I’d been the sole keeper for six years. I’d grown used to the isolation, the...

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The Hollow Man at the Bedpost

It began six weeks after my brother and I moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of Larkspur Hollow. We’d inherited it from our grandmother, a woman who’d lived...

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The Lantern in the Hills

It was late autumn in the town of Millbrook, and the air smelled of wet leaves and chimney smoke. I was seventeen, and my world revolved around the garage band...

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The Hollow in the Hill

I never thought I’d tell this story, not even to my bandmates, who’ve heard every weird tour tale I have. But after that night with Marcus, the producer from the...

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The Salt Cabinet

I was fourteen when it happened, two years after we moved into the old farmhouse on Larkspur Lane. My best friend, Jonah, was sleeping over, and my older brother, Derek,...

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The Ghost in the Speaker

It started with silence. That was the first thing I noticed after Grandpa Tobias died—the way the old farmhouse in the hills held its breath. I’d moved back to take...

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