Ghost stories from Arkansas

The Damp Wall

I never thought I’d be afraid of a wall, but that’s what it came down to. When I agreed to housesit for my aunt Delia and her new husband, Roger,...

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The Rusted Bell

The three of us—Mara, her husband Leo, and her brother Theo—arrived at the Iron Trestle Inn, a crumbling Victorian perched on a fog-wrapped hill in the Oregon Coast Range. We’d...

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The Salt of the Earth

The last of the guests had finally drifted into the warm glow of the farmhouse, their laughter and goodbyes swallowed by the thick, humid night. I remember thinking how the...

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The Clockwork Cadence

I woke to the soft chime of my grandmother’s mantel clock, its delicate notes marking 2 AM on Christmas morning. The house was silent, save for the rhythmic ticking of...

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The Ledger of Unsettled Accounts

The Municipal Archives of Port Blaire were housed in a brutalist concrete monolith erected in 1954, a structure that had replaced the original Victorian-era courthouse after a mysterious fire that...

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The Lantern in the Bog

I never considered myself a superstitious man. My upbringing in the hardscrabble town of Millbrook, where the mist clung to the lowlands like a shroud, taught me to trust in...

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The Persistent Ignition

The old farmhouse in central Illinois had a peculiar rhythm, especially in the late summer. My wife, Clara, and I cherished the long evenings on the porch, but the mosquitoes...

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The Grain of the Wood

The morning had that particular stillness that only comes with the first true heat of summer. I was on my second cup of coffee, watching the news flicker in the...

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The Night Visitor’s Gift

It was a balmy August evening when we gathered on the porch of our lakeside cabin, a ritual we’d perfected over the years. The grill hissed, glasses clinked, and the...

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The Laminate and the Low Growl

Elias and I have always considered ourselves lucky to have Milo, a six-year-old Border Terrier with a disposition so gentle that he seems to sense our every mood. If I’m...

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The Night the Gravel Spoke

We thought we’d finally settled into the old farmhouse, or at least made peace with its quirks. The warped floorboards, the cold spots in the hallway, the way the cellar...

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The Oak Grove Incident

Ever since the accident at the refinery — the one they called ‘The Big One’ — I’ve been… different. I see things, feel things that aren’t there, or that haven’t...

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The Damp Side of the Bed

Three weeks had passed since the night that thing stood at the foot of my bed. I had tried to rationalize it away—a trick of the moonlight, a half-remembered dream—but...

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The Salt Line

The house on Juniper Lane was a squat, gray-sided box that crouched behind a row of dying cedars. It wasn’t the house I wanted, but it was cheap, close to...

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The Custodian’s Math

At twenty-nine, I traded my hammer for a janitor’s keyring, hoping to pay for night classes at the community college. The job was simple: clean the Old Annex, a two-story...

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The Last Lantern at Low Gap

The afternoon had stretched into a dull, heavy blanket over the dry California valley. In the town of Redwood Bend, population 842, the heat shimmered off the asphalt like a...

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The Ledger on the Landing

When I first started seeing Evelyn, she lived with her parents in a drafty old farmhouse on the edge of a dying town called Morrow’s Hollow. They were waiting for...

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The Inventory of Empty Rooms

Elias and Cora had been married for three years when they finally scraped together enough for a fixer-upper on the edge of a dried-up lake bed. The house was a...

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The Blue Door at Solace Creek

The farmhouse at Solace Creek had been in our family for over a century, but I never knew until the summer I turned seventeen. My grandmother, a woman who prided...

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The Unspelled Name

I never wanted to be a psychic. It just happened, like a bad habit I couldn’t shake. My roommate, Mira, was the medium—she could see them, hear them, sometimes even...

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The Midnight Epiphany

I am a 28-year-old woman who has lived with a mild dust allergy my entire life, but it had been over a decade since I’d had a full-blown reaction. That...

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The Last Prayer at Hollow Creek

In the summer of 1971, our family of five set out from Tulsa, Oklahoma, heading to the Ozark hills of northwest Arkansas to visit my grandmother. The roads were narrow,...

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The Last Sunflower

It had been three weeks since Miriam had called me, her voice tight with a hope that felt like a fragile glass ornament. She said the disturbances in her farmhouse...

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The Cradle of Static

The town of Marrow Falls was a postcard from a fever dream, a jumble of crooked Victorian houses clinging to a mountainside in the Pennsylvania Appalachians. Tourists came for the...

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