Ghost stories from California

The Cold Draft

My move into Marcus’s house in the foothills of the Cascade Range had been an exercise in optimism. The place was a sprawling, wood-paneled affair, a relic from the ’70s...

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The Weight of the Unseen

In the quiet town of Ashford, where the old mill stood as a monument to forgotten industry, there lived a man named Edgar. He was a night watchman at the...

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The Gate of Sweet Nettles

In the summer of 1987, when I was nine, my twin brother Leo and I were playing in the long gravel driveway behind our house in the hills of Vermont....

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The Machine Under the Bed

It was the winter of 2004, and our family was packing for a trip to the coast of Oregon. I was twelve, my brother was seven, and we’d spent the...

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The Marrow of the Ash

The house on Culvert Lane was never meant to be ours. I knew it the moment I stepped through the warped front door, a cheap brass fixture that creaked like...

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The Grain in the Glass

When I was thirteen, my family moved to a rented farmhouse on the edge of a town called Millbrook. The house was old, with a wrap-around porch and a barn...

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The Fisherman’s Vigil

The moon hung low and heavy, a jaundiced coin against the bruised sky, as I drove home from the Merriweather’s annual gathering. It was a party that had sprawled past...

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The Bedroom’s Slow Invitation

In the summer of my eleventh year, my family gathered in the living room of our rented duplex on Spruce Street. The windows were open to the thick, humid air,...

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The Lantern’s Last Gasp

The night was stifling, heavy with the scent of pine and damp earth, when Margaret first heard the scratching. It came from the direction of the old greenhouse, a sound...

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The Salt Trail

I’m 22, a recent college dropout, and I’ve been living in my grandmother’s old farmhouse in the middle of Kansas wheat country. The nearest town is twenty miles away, and...

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The Weight of the Unseen

Mara had lived in the crumbling farmhouse for three years, ever since her grandmother passed. It sat alone on a dead-end dirt road, surrounded by hayfields that hadn’t been harvested...

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The Grain of the Oak

The house at 14 Maple Hollow Lane was finished in the autumn of 2007, its fresh pine smell still clinging to the walls when my parents, my younger sister, and...

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The Stained Chalkboard

I had flown from my humid bungalow in the Florida Keys to the arid sprawl of Phoenix to visit my brother, Liam. He was working as a night manager at...

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The Last Ward

The summer I turned twenty-two, I took a job as a night security guard at the old Fairview State Hospital annex. The main hospital had been demolished in the nineties,...

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The Green Passenger

It was a Tuesday in early autumn, the kind of day that makes you forget the world can be cruel. My friends, Iris and Margo, had taken the afternoon to...

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The Chalk Circle

I started taking an online course in automatic writing last autumn, mostly out of curiosity. My study, a converted attic room, was cluttered with oddities: a wooden desk by the...

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The Blink That Lasted Too Long

I was scraping burnt cheese off a cast-iron skillet at 3:47 AM when the house made a sound like a held breath. My family slept two floors above, my twin...

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The Constant Companion

I’ve spent my life cataloging the moments when reality seems to fray at the edges. Some people see shapes in clouds; I see faces in the static of old televisions....

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The Mystery of the Moving Objects

In a small town, there stood an old house that had seen better days. It was the kind of place where children dared each other to step inside, but few...

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The Mariner’s Bouquet

I had always been a skeptic when it came to ghost stories, but my wife, Clara, was the opposite. She devoured every tale of the supernatural and dragged me to...

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The Pencil’s Path

It was a Tuesday, or maybe a Wednesday, the kind of day that blurs into the next when you’re on break from university. I was at my cousin’s place, a...

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The Haunted Impressions

When I moved into the old cottage with my teenage son and wife, I was excited about the new beginning. It was a quaint place, situated on the edge of...

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The Doorway in the Dark

The silence in our house was a physical thing, pressing against my eardrums like packed cotton. For eight days, the hallway bathroom had been still, the faucet no longer dripping...

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The Nursery Manifest

The old house on Hemlock Lane had finally settled. After the séance, after the soft whispers in the basement, after the little girl’s essence had been guided into the light,...

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