Ghost stories from California

The Pellet Stove’s Hum

In the autumn of 2019, I moved into my late Aunt Cora’s farmhouse in the remote town of Blackwood, Vermont. The house was a century-old Cape Cod style, with creaking...

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The Hanging Lamp on Vine Street

I never believed in ghosts until I moved into the old duplex on Vine Street. The previous tenant, a retired seamstress named Mrs. Kowalski, had died in the bedroom, and...

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The Silt-Boned Lantern

I didn’t plan to get lost in Portland, Maine. I had a map, I had GPS, but the city twisted like a salted slug under my boots. By the time...

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The Tin Roof’s Lament

It was a humid Tuesday evening in late September, and I was at my partner’s place—a creaky old farmhouse on the edge of a dying town called Morrow’s Hollow. The...

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The Uninvited Tremor

The smell of stale beer and mothballs clung to the air of my Aunt Rosa’s house, a suffocating blanket that seemed to press against my skin. We were there for...

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The Circuit

In the high desert of Nevada, where the sagebrush whispers and the mountains bleed into a sky the color of dried blood, the old communications relay station squatted like a...

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The Sixth Ward’s Bargain

I never believed in ghosts. I had mocked the very idea with the cruel arrogance of a twelve-year-old who had never been tested. My name is Martin, and in the...

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The Rooted Burden

I remember the day we drove up to the house at the end of Maple Lane. It was August 1987, and the heat shimmered off the asphalt like a mirage....

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The Painted Door

In the winter of 2012, my partner Alex and I moved into a converted Victorian flat on the third floor of an old building on Hemlock Street. The neighborhood was...

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The Flattened Reeds

The first time I saw the reeds flatten, I was walking the canal path at dusk. My name is Harold, and I’ve always been a collector of the unexplained—crop circles,...

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The Hungry Stairwell

When I first moved to the city of Veridian, I felt utterly alone, adrift in a sea of concrete and neon. But through a mutual acquaintance, I met a guy...

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The Kanji in the Rice Field

Marcus had always been a man of logic. A 24-year-old software engineer from Atlanta, he prided himself on his rationality, his ability to dissect any problem into solvable components. But...

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The Pale Visitor

I was working the graveyard shift at a twenty-four-hour diner in the sleepy town of Pinedale, Oregon, when this happened. It was the kind of place where the most exciting...

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The Game That Ate the Light

The house on Hemlock Lane was a foreclosure, and my parents bought it with the kind of desperate hope that only comes from a growing family and a shrinking bank...

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The Marrow of Stillwater Pines

Every autumn, my wife Elena and I escaped the city for a weekend of quiet and mist. This year, October 2007, we cut our coastal trip short to spend one...

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The Stained Glass Sentinel

My partner in these investigations, Marcus Webb, had always been a skeptic. He’d joke that our EVP sessions were just us recording the static of downtown Meridian on a Friday...

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Mara had been familiar with the tethered darkness of sleep paralysis since childhood. The familiar weight on her chest, the suffocating stillness, and the creeping certainty that something watched from...

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The Fourth Visit

My friend Marcus has always been a little off. Not in a bad way, but in a way that makes you uneasy. He’s died three times, or so he says....

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The Bone Orchard

I had a friend, Dale, who worked at a crematorium and moonlighted as a stand-up comic. ‘Laughing in the face of death,’ he’d say, ‘keeps the other gig from eating...

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The Red Lanterns of Gull’s Perch

The first year out of boot camp, I was twenty years old and dumb as a bag of hammers. My buddies and I—all of us fresh from the Great Lakes...

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The Flicker Pact

In the dry heat of a Nevada suburb, I grew up in a two-story house that always smelled of sunbaked wood and the faint metallic tang of the air conditioner....

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The Last Tenant

I had never believed in ghosts, not really. To me, the afterlife was a concept for late-night debates and horror movies, not something that would ever touch my mundane life....

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The Ashen Orchard

The leaf-strewn path wound through the old apple orchard, the trees gnarled and blackened with age, their branches scratching at the gray October sky. I had arranged to meet a...

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