Ghost stories from California

The Weight on My Chest

I woke suddenly in the darkness, my lungs straining for air that wouldn’t come. My first thought was of my dog, a large fellow who sometimes stretched out across me...

The Spectral Roundup

I moved into the converted barn loft on the outskirts of Cinder Hollow, hoping for a quiet place to write my novel. The landlord had mentioned ‘quirky vibrations,’ but I...

The Weight of the Unseen

The old lighthouse keeper, Silas, had always been a solitary man. His only companions were the gulls, the ceaseless roar of the ocean, and the creaking timbers of the ancient...

The Weight of Stillness

The motel room smelled of bleach and stale cigarettes, a scent that clung to the cheap floral curtains and the worn carpet. I’d checked in late, exhausted from a long...

The Weight of the Down

I never believed in the old house on Wrenwood Lane, not really. The town had whispered about it for generations, but I chalked that up to small-town boredom. When I...

The Hollow Hours

My grandmother on my mother’s side had a reputation in our small town of Bakersfield, not for fortune-telling, but for something far older and stranger. She kept a locked room...

The Ceiling of Ash

The first thing I noticed about the apartment at 15 Marrow Lane was the smell—a faint, sweet odor like overripe fruit left in a hot car. My roommate, Ellis, called...

The Latch

The first time I saw the latch, I was seven, standing at the foot of my grandmother’s cellar stairs. She had died the winter before, and my father had inherited...

The Salt Creek Annex

The summer I turned eleven, my family moved to the outskirts of a small Nebraska town, into a neighborhood that had been carved out of the prairie in the 1950s....

The Rattling Pail

In the autumn of 2018, Dr. Lena Hartley, a historian specializing in indigenous Californian cultures, received a call from an old friend, Ruth Pendleton. Ruth lived in the small, fog-shrouded...

The Last Warmth

My grandmother, Elara, had always been a woman of logic and order. She scoffed at the stories I told her of the flickering lights in my childhood bedroom or the...

The Iron Gate

I’ve always had a knack for sensing things others can’t, though I never quite called it a gift. More like a curse that hums beneath my skin, waiting for the...

The Iron Lullaby

The old Packard Hotel had been a landmark for over a century, a grand Victorian relic that had seen better days. After the mill closed, the town withered, and the...

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