Ghost stories from California

The Knob That Turned

The first month in the old farmhouse, I chalked it up to new-house jitters. The walls creaked, the wind moaned through the loose window frames, and the barn out back...

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The Constant at the Fence Line

I’ve never told anyone the whole story, not even my therapist. My name isn’t important; what matters is that I’m nineteen, I live in a small desert town in Arizona,...

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The Empty Suit

Marla and I shared a cramped attic bedroom in our grandmother’s old farmhouse on the edge of Parson’s Hollow, a town so small it didn’t even have a stoplight. For...

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The Salt-Crusted Door

It happened three weeks ago, while I was housesitting for my cousin Mira at her place in the hills—a modern A-frame with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a pine forest. The house...

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The Man in the Linen Closet

It was the summer I turned eleven, and we’d just moved into the old Hollis house on Birchwood Lane. My parents called it a ‘fixer-upper,’ which meant the wallpaper was...

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The Clay Room

My name is Elena, and I was seventeen when we moved into the house on Hemlock Lane. It was a sprawling Victorian in the middle of a Nebraska cornfield, miles...

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The Lantern’s Debt

The brochure promised ‘an evening with the unseen,’ and Marcus had bought it as a birthday surprise for Elara, ignoring the non-refundable fine print. They joined a small group at...

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The Lenten Gift

I had just moved into a charming little cottage on the edge of a forest, and I was thrilled. I had spent the entire morning unpacking boxes and placing each...

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The Mannequin in the Hall

Five years ago, when I was thirteen, my family and I lived in a sprawling, old Victorian house on the edge of a dense pine forest. The house had a...

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The Hollow House of Harlow

In the rust-choked town of Harlow, where the river ran black and the trees grew in knots, there stood a house that the locals called the Hollow. It was a...

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The Hollow in the Hallway

I’ve always been terrified of the dark, but it wasn’t until I moved back into my grandmother’s old house that I realized the dark was terrified of me. Or maybe...

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The Casserole Waiting

The first time it happened, I was standing at the kitchen window, watching the rain streak down the glass, tracing the droplets with my finger. I had just moved into...

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The Bent Rail

In the autumn of 1999, my father and I moved into a squat brick bungalow on Maple Lane, a ten-minute drive from the suburban house that had been home for...

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The Cartographer’s Error

It’s been almost thirty years since I last saw the map, and yet the memory of it feels as fresh as the day I unfolded it beneath the flickering bulb...

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The Cold Aisle of Aubrey House

In the autumn of 2016, I moved into a sprawling Victorian house in the hills of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, to catalog the estate of a reclusive collector. The house, named...

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The Key Clip That Clicked

It was the autumn of 2011, and I had just returned from my evening seminar at the University of Arden Hills, in the sleepy town of Cedar Falls, Iowa. The...

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The Lantern Keeper

I had just moved into a rental cottage on the edge of a small Oregon town, three months after my sister’s funeral. The house was a relic from the 1920s,...

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The Orchard Keeper

In the late autumn of 1987, the town of Ashford Hills was a patchwork of identical split-level houses built on an old apple orchard. My family moved into number 14...

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The Grinning Vault

For fifteen years, I’ve tried to rationalize what happened in the old farmhouse on the edge of Cinder Hollow, but every logical explanation crumbles under the weight of that memory....

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The Lamp That Never Dimmed

I was twenty-six, back in my childhood home for the first time in a decade, waiting out the weeks before a new job and a new apartment two states over....

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The Plague of Stillness

Mara turned forty on a Tuesday, the same day the first of the finches fell dead from the eaves of the old farmhouse. She found it on the cracked flagstone...

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The Crooked Hallway

My partner, Elias, and I had agreed to take a breather from our engagement, but we still shared bills and a dog, so we met at his grandparents’ place on...

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The Blanket’s Warmth

Nina had always been a light sleeper, but tonight was different. The apartment she shared with her fiancé, Alex, was a cozy one-bedroom in the heart of a bustling city,...

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The Gate of Cinders

The drive to the Ridgeway place was a slow suffocation. My wife, Ellen, and I had our six-month-old, Danny, secured in the back, and the moment we turned off the...

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