Ghost stories from California

The Counting Game

My sixteenth birthday was supposed to be a simple sleepover at my Aunt Mabel’s old farmhouse, a place my cousins swore was haunted. My friends – Lena, Priya, Jess, and...

The Painted Jar

The November air carried the scent of damp earth and woodsmoke as I, at age seven, crouched on the cracked concrete of our apartment’s backyard in the outskirts of Millbrook....

The Weight of Stillness

After the collapse of my marriage and the subsequent unraveling of my career, I found myself drifting. My grandmother, a woman of few words but profound kindness, offered me refuge...

The Salt Line

The summer my cousin Lena came to stay, the air in the valley felt wrong. Not in a way you could point to, but like the buzz before a storm...

The Third-Floor Nursery

I had spent thirty-two years in that house on Hemlock Street, and in all that time, I never saw a thing. My grandmother swore the attic breathed, my aunt claimed...

The Jackal’s Grin

Eight years ago, my mother, my little sister, and I were driving from the dusty outskirts of Tucson to my older brother’s place near Fresno. The desert stretched endlessly around...

The Ledger of the Last Bet

The Riverbend Social Club had stood on the banks of the Blackwood River for over a century, its red brick facade weathered by floods and time. It was a place...

The Static in Room 12

I’ve always been attuned to the other side, a sensitivity I never asked for. In my old town of Millbrook, we moved into a Victorian-style house on Birchwood Lane, a...

The Tarot Reader’s Vengeance

Elara had always been sensitive to the unseen. Growing up in the fog-drenched town of Pemberton, she’d learned to live with the whispers of the dead, the cold spots in...

The Iron Kettle

In 1983, I was seventeen and helping my aunt run the Iron Kettle, a diner perched on the edge of the Klamath River in Northern California. The town was called...

The Wall That Breathed

I was housesitting for my aunt while she took her six-year-old, Mia, to visit their grandmother upstate. Her old farmhouse, nestled at the end of a dirt road that seemed...

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