Ghost stories from Arizona

The Last Parcel

The old house on Hemlock Lane had been in my family for generations, but it was the attic that held the real secrets. I had always had a way with...

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The Petroglyph in the Wall

Before I moved into my bungalow in the high desert outside of Santa Fe in 2019, I had spent five years in a cramped studio above a laundromat in Albuquerque....

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The Silversmith’s Locket

I was born and raised in the dusty outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the earth itself seemed to hold secrets beneath its cracked skin. My parents were devout...

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The Static in the Walls

The first time I noticed the wrongness was the day we moved into the old farmhouse on the outskirts of Coldwater Creek, a town that existed only because the highway...

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What my Roommate Brought In

In 2003 I moved into a brand new house southwest of Phoenix in a small farming community that stands in the shadows of the Estrella Mountains. It is a beautiful...

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The Pumice Tooth

Before I turned to reflexology, I worked the polish bar at a wellness emporium called ‘The Tepid Oasis,’ a name that promised more serenity than our fluorescent-lit strip mall could...

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The Winter of Broken Glass

In the bleak December of 2003, I drove through the frozen streets of Duluth, Minnesota, to visit my brother-in-law, Carl. He had moved back from the East Coast six months...

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The Glass Visitor

It was late October, the year I turned seventeen, and the house on Cedar Lane felt emptier than ever. My parents were away on a business trip, leaving me alone...

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The Hollow Mannequin

The last Tuesday of November, the rain hadn’t stopped for three days. My sister Clara and I were alone in our grandfather’s old house—a sprawling Victorian with creaking floorboards and...

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The Unseen Map

I was nineteen when I started seeing the maps. Not the kind you buy at a gas station, but something else, something that drew itself across the back of my...

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The Last Static of Martha’s Lantern

My great-aunt Elsie was a formidable woman, a lighthouse keeper’s daughter from a storm-battered island off the coast of Maine. She’d spent her life tending to the sick in a...

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The Last Broadcast of Station KX-13

For eleven years, the numbers had been a constant, a low hum of dread that pulsed beneath the surface of our lives. Then, on a Tuesday in late October, they...

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The Catacomb Garden

When I returned from the mountain village of Abuela Rosa, the nightmares faded, and life in the city felt almost bearable. My brother and sister resumed their schooling, but our...

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The Incomplete Grid

In the late autumn of 1984, I worked the night shift at a printing plant on the edge of a town that was slowly choking on its own growth. Every...

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The Glass Reflection

The house on Birchwood Lane was a testament to my grandmother’s obsession with fish. The living room was dominated by a massive aquarium, a glowing cube of water that cast...

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The Steam-Locked Visitor

The desert heat usually made our little tract house feel like an oven, but that morning the air inside was cold and heavy, like a held breath. I was fifteen,...

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The Drowned Hour

Maren was six when the waking terrors began. It wasn’t the nightmares themselves that frightened her—those were just strange, formless dreads that dissolved like fog in the morning. It was...

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The Withering Room

I’ve always had a knack for finding the wrong places. Not haunted houses in the classic sense—no rattling chains or floating specters—but places that felt wrong, like a note played...

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The Garden of Unfinished Names

It was the autumn of 2019, and I had found an odd solace in the old municipal garden, a place where the city had long ago planted a memorial grove...

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The Linoleum Gaze

The first time I heard them, I was scrubbing the cafeteria floor at the Maplewood Memory Care facility. The bucket’s gray water swirled with diluted bleach, and my reflection wobbled...

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The Porcelain Inheritor

The afternoon light bled through the dusty windows of the old farmhouse, casting long, warped shadows across the floorboards. I had the place to myself, my parents and my sister...

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The Tin Shed Melody

In the autumn of 1967, my father moved us from the damp valleys of Oregon to the dusty outskirts of Bakersfield, California. I was eight. Our new home was the...

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The Picture in the Hallway

Last month, I dreamed my family and I had bought a new home. My son, my wife, and I walked through the empty rooms, surprised by our good fortune. In...

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The Unseen Gardener

The old farmhouse creaked around Elias, a symphony of settling timbers and an unseen wind that seemed to whisper through the sealed windows. He’d inherited the place from a distant...

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