Ghost stories from Arkansas

The Latch That Opened for the Hollow

My great-aunt Marigold had a way of telling stories that made the air in the room go still. She’d sit by the fire, her knitting needles clicking like teeth, and...

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The Phantom Kitchen Visitor

The old farmhouse they rented sat on the edge of a cornfield that rustled even when the air was still. After the knocking, which seemed to come from inside the...

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The Static Choir

The day the Grants moved into the old lighthouse keeper’s cottage on Prowling Point, the fog rolled in thick as wool and never really left. It pressed against the windows...

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The Door at Dawn

In the spring of 2008, my partner and I rented a garden-level flat in the outskirts of a town called Millbrook, nestled between the rust-colored hills and the old railway....

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The Late Night Static

In the autumn of 2019, I was housesitting for my aunt in her old Victorian, a place that always smelled of dust and mothballs. My aunt was on a cruise,...

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The Lantern in the Pines

My name is Elias Vant, and I have carried a splinter of terror in my heart since the autumn I turned nine. Our home stood at the edge of the...

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Carol Street Has Some Reflecting To Do

I moved in the brick home on Carol Street in 2012 not long after my divorce. I didn’t meet the folks while we negotiated the deal, but I did work...

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The Dirt Underneath

The old Henderson place sat on a bluff overlooking the muddy expanse of the Vermillion River, a stone’s throw from the state’s famous ‘gem fields’—a tourist trap that promised buried...

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The Girl Who Counted Stars

It was the third night aboard the Nebula Line’s luxury coach, a sleek silver behemoth ferrying its passengers through the endless salt flats of the Barren Expanse. I’d boarded two...

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The Itch That Crawls

Mara had always been attuned to the house on Hemlock Lane. It was a Victorian relic, its gingerbread trim peeling like sunburned skin, its porch groaning under the weight of...

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The Constant Knocker

The first thing I noticed about the house on Cedar Lane was the silence. After eight months of packing and unpacking, of cardboard boxes and bubble wrap, the quiet felt...

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The Threshold Borrower

The ranch house sat at the end of a gravel road, its paint peeling like sunburnt skin. Iris and her older brother, Caleb, had moved there after their parents’ divorce,...

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The Drowned Locket

I moved into the old Jensen place three months ago, a crumbling Victorian perched on the edge of the salt marshes. The realtor called it ‘characterful,’ but the locals just...

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The Constant Visitor

I was four when I first noticed the boy in my room. He stood at the foot of my bed, his silhouette backlit by the pale moonlight filtering through the...

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The Static Between Us

When I first moved to the small town of Clearwater, I thought the library would be my sanctuary. I didn’t have a computer at home, and the library’s quiet, dusty...

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The Dryer’s Hum

The old house on Cedar Lane had stood for over a century, its bones creaking with every shift of the wind. We’d grown up with its quirks, the way lights...

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The Clockwork Keeper

It had been fourteen months since we left the old house, and I’d almost convinced myself that the silence was permanent. I’d stopped jumping at creaks in the night, stopped...

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The Shattered Effigy

The summer I turned fourteen, my mother let me have two friends over for a sleepover at our dusty farmhouse in Nebraska, a place where the cornfields stretched like a...

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The Porcelain Saint

The summer I turned thirty-four, my husband’s family handed us the keys to their inheritance: a sagging Victorian in the thumb of Michigan, surrounded by orchards that had gone feral....

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The Rectangular Void

The night air in the farmhouse was thick with the scent of old wood and dried herbs. I lay in bed, the sheets pulled up to my chin, while my...

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The Engine That Gnaws

The house on Marrow Lane was a mistake from the start, but Leonora had needed somewhere cheap and fast, and the landlord’s sliding-scale rent was too tempting to ignore. The...

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The Hollow Knocking

Ever since I can remember, I’ve seen the pale ones. Not the shadowy figures people whisper about, but translucent, skeletal things that drift through walls and hover over sleeping forms....

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The Weight of Stillness

The delivery room smelled of antiseptic and something metallic that I couldn’t quite place. My daughter, Elara, was born on the twenty-second of February, at 2:01 p.m., breaking the monotony...

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The Crank of the Wind-Up Bell

The trouble always starts when I write things down. I’ve learned that the hard way, but I keep doing it, like picking at a scab. I’ve kept a journal on...

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