Ghost stories from Arkansas

The Weight of Rain

The year I turned seven, the sky over the plains had a bruise that wouldn’t heal. Dad’s boots were always caked with gray mud from the relief work, and the...

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The Salt-Stained Tile

In the autumn of 2014, our family had just moved into an old coastal house, the kind that smelled of brine and peeling paint. My wife, Clara, and I had...

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The Long One in the Cornfield

In the autumn of 2014, my husband, Elias, and I moved to a small town called Morrow, nestled in the heart of the Midwest. Our house sat on the outskirts,...

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The Hollow Ticker

In the autumn of 2011, I was house-sitting for my aunt in the rural town of Morrow’s Hollow. The house was a relic, with a grandfather clock that chimed erratically,...

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The Station Master’s Replica

In the autumn of 2014, my family and I lived in a converted railway station, the old ticket office now our living room, the waiting room our kitchen. The station...

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The Stalker in the Static

The date eludes me, but I know it was the tail end of 2011, perhaps early 2012. I sat down to write this on a cold November night in 2023,...

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The Locker of the Ninth

My name is Elias Thorne, and I’ve spent most of my adult life as a historian, chasing the past through dusty archives and crumbling ruins. But nothing in my research...

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The December Ember

The call came at 11:47 PM, dragging me from a dreamless sleep. I checked the screen: my sister, Ellen. I’d left three voicemails and a string of texts earlier, each...

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The Stain That Wouldn’t Dry

The day we put down our Great Dane, Barley, the vet’s office smelled of antiseptic and wet fur. My daughter, Mira, was eight, with a constellation of freckles across her...

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The Tin Can Lullaby

We moved into the old Jorgensen place in the autumn of ’96, the year the leaves turned a muddy brown before they ever got a chance to be orange. My...

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The Lathe of the Garden

I’ve always been able to see things that others can’t, but I learned early to keep it to myself. When I was seven, I told my aunt about the old...

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The Weeping Maiden of Ward Three

My only brush with the other side happened in the winter of 1994, at a rehabilitation center for the blind nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians. The place was...

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The Light Under the Stairs

In the fall of 2014, I was heavy with my second child, and my partner, Elias, and I had moved into my grandmother’s old duplex on the outskirts of a...

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The Hollow at Wolf Creek

The first time I saw the light, I thought it was a reflection off a piece of tin in the creek. We’d bought the old farmstead at the edge of...

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The Last Box

The old farmhouse sat at the end of a gravel road, miles from the nearest neighbor. Marcus and Elara had moved there for the quiet, for the space, for the...

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The Hollow at Mile 14

I’ve spent my whole life in the little town of Pine Hollow, tucked against the vast woodlands of northern Michigan. It’s a place where the lake is the only thing...

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The Pane of the Unseen

Before all this, I only had a single memory of the gray house on Mulberry Lane—the one we rented during that dry, endless summer. I was four, and the heat...

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The Blue Intent

My name is Elara, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve been what folks in my small coastal town call ‘touched.’ My mother would tell me how, as...

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The Sallow Wisp

It was the summer I turned fourteen, the one where the heat clung to your skin like a second layer and the air smelled of pine and rot. My cousin...

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The Static Bloom

I was five the winter we moved into the old farmhouse, the one with the dead orchard and the well that breathed. My father called it ‘character.’ My mother called...

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The Grinning Hollow

I’ve always been able to feel them. Not see them, not hear them, but feel them like a pressure change in the air, a wrongness in the pit of my...

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The Harvest of Hollow Creek

Every August, my family would pack up our dusty sedan and drive the winding back roads to my grandmother’s farm in the Missouri bootheel. The trip was a pilgrimage, a...

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The Night the Kudzu Sang

The air in the Mississippi Delta that August was thick enough to chew, and the hum of cicadas was a constant, droning pulse beneath the skin of the world. Me,...

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