Ghost stories from California

The Fourth Visitor

I was nine the summer we moved to the old farmhouse in the Catskills, a place my parents called ‘a fixer-upper with character.’ The house creaked and groaned like an...

Read Story →

The Slat and the Tallow

In the autumn of 1998, I was twenty-one and still bunking in the converted sunroom of my grandmother’s farmhouse. The house was a creaking bones of a place, with warped...

Read Story →

The Cinder Man

The first time I saw him, I was drowning in a lake of fire. The dream had the clarity of a wound—the heat, the smell of scorched pine, the way...

Read Story →

The Hollow Floor Above

In 1987, when I was nine, I lived with my Aunt Margaret and Uncle Paul in their creaky Victorian house in Gladewater, Texas. My room was in the basement, and...

Read Story →

The Grain in the Static

It was the autumn of 1998, and I was home alone in our new house on Maplewood Drive, a two-story with creaky floorboards and a furnace that groaned. I had...

Read Story →

The Static Between Tracks

In the autumn of my seventeenth year, I spent most nights at a basement apartment in the industrial part of town, a place that smelled of mildew and stale beer....

Read Story →

The Slash of the Third Floor

The old mill house on Bramble Lane was the only home I’d ever known, but at eleven, I’d started to hate it. The third floor, where my room sat, was...

Read Story →

The Hollow Glow of Junction 9

On the last night of summer, 2014, I dozed off on the hood of my brother’s rusted Chevy in the dirt lot behind the old grain elevator. The town of...

Read Story →

The Dog That Wouldn’t Howl

The night sat heavy over the delta town of Stillwater, a place where the river’s fog crept like a living thing between the levee and the old cannery. A blue...

Read Story →

The Cold Balcony

I’ve always been sensitive to the other side. Since I was a kid, I’d feel cold spots, hear whispers in empty rooms, and sometimes I’d feel a gentle touch on...

Read Story →

The Cartographer’s Ledger

The morning sun was a pale smear through the windshield of my old Chevy as I rolled out of Sacramento. I’d barely slept, my eyes gritty with exhaustion, but the...

Read Story →

The Lantern’s Vigil

Ever since my grandmother passed, I’d been spending weekends at her old farmhouse, sorting through a lifetime of clutter. The place was a relic, with a hand-cranked telephone and a...

Read Story →

The Brass Hand

In the autumn of 1991, Margaret and I moved into a converted Victorian flat in Portland, Oregon, a place where the fog clung to the streets like damp wool. The...

Read Story →

The Weight at the Top of the Stairs

In the autumn of 2001, when the world was still reeling from September’s shock, my family had just moved into an old farmhouse outside a small town in Vermont. The...

Read Story →

The Static Beneath the Floorboards

The night air in Tucson had a way of clinging to the skin, even when the sun had long surrendered to the desert dark. I was 17, sprawled across my...

Read Story →

The Glassblower’s Vigil

The winter solstice had always felt like a wound in the year, a gash where the sun bled out early. I’d moved to the old Kessler place in early fall,...

Read Story →

The Gravity That Held Me Down

I moved to the Cascades for the quiet, for the way the fog rolled over the pines like a slow tide. My cabin was a mile from the nearest neighbor,...

Read Story →

The Lantern’s Debt

The first time I saw the marshmallow incident, I knew Nazu was a bad influence. His name was actually Nazir, but everyone called him Nazu because of his twitchy energy,...

Read Story →

The Weight of the Air

I was nine when I hung that little wooden bird from the shelf above my bed. It was a stupid thing, painted blue with a chipped beak, and I tied...

Read Story →

The Quilt’s Hollow

The night air in the old farmhouse carried the scent of dust and dried lavender, a scent that clung to the quilts and curtains like a memory refusing to leave....

Read Story →

The Drying Cycle

It was one of those mundane evenings that begins with small domestic irritations and ends with a mouthful of sand. My son, Leo, had his jiu-jitsu promotion test the next...

Read Story →

The Fourth Floor Archives

It began with a key. Not a skeleton key, but one of those small, unassuming ones that open filing cabinets in forgotten offices. My girlfriend, Mira, had just started her...

Read Story →

The Resonance in the Crawlspace

The night air in Duluth carried the damp chill of Lake Superior, and the old house on 4th Street groaned with every gust. I was staying with my partner, Maya,...

Read Story →