Ghost stories from Arizona

The Cinder Child

My friend Elias, a man whose word I trust as firmly as I trust the sun to rise, once shared a story that has never released its grip on my...

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The Galloping Mechanism

The house on Maple Street was the kind that always had a faint smell of mothballs and old wood, even in summer. My bedroom was at the top of the...

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The Silence Between Notes

In the fall of my senior year, I was taking an advanced digital media class at Ridgemont High. My partner, Maya, and I had decided to produce a short documentary...

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The Static Garden

I never believed in ghosts. I had always found comfort in the tangible world, the vibrations of the floorboards, the hum of the fridge, the flicker of a lightbulb. When...

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The Night the Server Room Hummed

The first night I moved to the graveyard shift at Meridian Data Solutions, I felt like I’d won a lottery. No more buzzing open-plan office, no more micromanaging supervisors, no...

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The Persistent Halo

It began with the light above the kitchen sink. My great-aunt Marta, who raised me after my parents passed, started scolding me for leaving it on at night. But I...

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The Static in the Wiring

My name is Marisol, and I’ve always been a night owl, finding comfort in the hum of my laptop and the glow of the screen when the rest of the...

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The Persistence of Static

Mara Voss, a 48-year-old archivist, had spent the last three decades cataloging the forgotten. She lived alone in a creaking Victorian house on the edge of a dying town, a...

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The Gear-Grinder’s Waltz

The summer after senior year, my buddy Max inherited his great-aunt’s house in the dusty outskirts of a decaying mill town. The place was a Victorian monstrosity, all peeling paint...

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The Latch of the Root Cellar

I never thought much about the old farmhouse until the summer I turned sixteen, when Mom decided I needed to spend a week with Great-Uncle Elias. He was a taciturn...

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The Nightmare That Only Gets Worse

I feel like I need to start this off with a warning that this story does contain explicit content, and I share it hoping that it helps me maybe identify...

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The Grove of Unseen Things

In the autumn of 1987, I was shipped off to a rehabilitation ranch in the high desert of New Mexico, a place called La Mesita. The facility was an old...

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The Last Cartographer’s Visit

The night before Aunt Mabel’s funeral, I checked into the Lilac Inn, a faded Victorian bed-and-breakfast perched on a bluff overlooking the funeral parlor. The town of Gray’s Landing seemed...

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The Menu at the End of the Line

It was the spring of 2015, and I was two weeks away from my senior prom. My best friend, Cassie, and I had planned to celebrate at a fancy Italian...

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The Return of the Hollow Man

I remember the day the world tilted on its axis, the day I learned that some doors should never be opened twice. It was a crisp autumn morning, the kind...

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The Hollow Aisles of Redmond’s

I’d worked the evening shift at Redmond’s Grocery for three months, long enough to know that the store had its own peculiar rhythm—the hum of freezers, the flicker of a...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Ledger

Three years ago, on a rain-slicked October evening, I drove with two friends, Marta and Elias, to the abandoned mining town of Grey Hollow. We had heard the stories: how...

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The Man on the Shelf

I was only four when we moved to the desert town of Barstow, California, a dry, dusty place where the sun bleached everything pale and the nights were cold enough...

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The Fifth Floor Mirror

The Redwood Inn was a place where time seemed to slow, its corridors lined with faded floral wallpaper and brass sconces that flickered with bulbs on the verge of death....

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The Empty Vanity

Almost a year before the accident, I woke from a dream that left a cold knot in my chest. I had seen our bedroom, but our oak vanity was gone,...

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The Bone-Colored Horizon

I lost my husband, Elias, to a sudden heart attack in the spring, and the grief was a physical weight. Our Airstream, ‘The Wanderer,’ was our sanctuary, and I couldn’t...

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The Hollow Wing

In the autumn of 2016, I took a night position at St. Elara’s, a small and aging hospital nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians. The town was called Morrow’s...

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The Cradle of Static

The clock on the nightstand read 2:14 AM when I was ripped from a dreamless sleep by a sound I’d never heard from him before—a low, guttural growl that vibrated...

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The Moth in the Hall Light

During the autumn of 1987, I was seven, and my brother was ten. We lived in a cramped railroad-style flat above a dusty antiques shop in a sleepy New England...

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