Ghost stories from Arkansas

The Mannequin in the Attic

It is not the dark that frightens me now, nor the silence that wraps around old houses like a shroud. It is the memory of a summer that never seemed...

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The New Apartment

It happened 4 years ago. My daughter just turned 2. We moved into an apartment. As soon we moved in my daughter just refused to even play in her room....

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The Root Cellar’s Keeper

My brother and I were spending the weekend at our grandmother’s place, a sprawling Victorian that had been in the family for generations. It sat on a hill overlooking a...

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The Cold Room on Maple Street

We moved into the old Victorian on Maple Street in the fall of 2007, full of hope and boxes. The neighborhood was charming, with tree-lined sidewalks and neighbors who waved...

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The Pale Stalker of Route 9

It started on a Tuesday, the kind of gray morning that made the world look like an old photograph. I was on the school bus, Route 9, winding through the...

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The Copper Token

At thirteen, summer hung thick and green around the old Sharpe House, which my mother insisted on calling the ‘Heritage Hollow Bed and Breakfast,’ though no one had slept there...

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The Salt Line

My grandmother always said the land remembers, even when people forget. We moved to a place called Hollow Creek when I was twelve, a single-wide trailer set on a plot...

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The Weeping Stains

I never thought much of the water stains on the ceiling of my rented flat in the old, drafty building on Kronecker Street. The landlord said they were from a...

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The Taste of Iron

I’ve never put much stock in the unseen, not even after all these years in the old Cordova house. I was raised to believe in a protective hand, and that...

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The Attic Resident

My brother and I were nine and seven when we moved into the old house on Willow Creek Lane. The place had stood empty for years, and the realtor warned...

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The Last Polaroid

I hadn’t seen my father in five years, not since he’d moved to the dusty outskirts of Sierra Vista, Arizona. When he called to say he’d married a woman named...

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The Unwitnessed Count

I have always been a light sleeper, but it was more than that. For as long as I can remember, the hours between three and four in the morning have...

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The Static Garden

In the autumn of 1981, I was a twenty-year-old art student renting a room in a converted Victorian house on the edge of a town that had long since forgotten...

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The Flicker Code

I’ve been the night clerk at the Saltmarsh Motor Lodge for nearly eight months now, and in that time I’ve learned to accept the peculiar rhythms of a place that...

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The Iron Chime

My wife Elena and I moved into the old Rourke Manor in the foothills of the Cascades last autumn, hoping for a peaceful place to raise our two boys, Samuel...

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The Hollow Answer

The house on Maple Street was a modern colonial, only twenty years old, set among older Victorians and brick colonials that boasted histories of their own. My family moved there...

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The Foggy Mirror

I was nine when my best friend Mara turned nine. Her birthday party had been the day before, and now it was the morning after. I’d stayed over with our...

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The Face in the Photograph

My cousin and I were testing the camera on my new computer. I wanted a good picture for my profile, so I posed while she clicked the button over and...

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The Luminary Bloom

The old observatory, perched precariously on the edge of the barren moors, had been Silas’s sanctuary. Dust motes danced in the slivers of moonlight that pierced the grimy dome, illuminating...

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The Hollow in the Attic

The summer I turned fourteen, my mother rented a crumbling Victorian house on the edge of Pine Hollow, a town so small it didn’t even have a stoplight. We’d moved...

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The Cadence of the Hollow Wall

The evening had settled into our small rented cottage on the edge of the Harlow Woods, a place chosen for its isolation and the promise of a quiet weekend. My...

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The Occupant in the Basement

I was twenty-one when I moved to Harlow, a city that never quite seemed to shake the gray from its sky. My apartment was a fifth-floor walk-up in an old...

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The Vent That Breathed

When Lena was twelve, her mother, Greta, and her stepfather, Marcus, moved them into a sprawling Victorian house on the outskirts of a town called Hollow Creek, a place that...

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The Granary’s Bargain

At twelve, I was a city kid dumped on my grandfather’s remote farm for a week while my parents vacationed in Portugal. The farm was a sprawling, forgotten expanse of...

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