Ghost stories from California

The Winged Stain

The summer I turned sixteen, my father moved us to a rented farmhouse in the dusty outskirts of Marfa, Texas. The house was a relic of the 1920s, with creaking...

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The Lavender Gown

I never believed in ghosts, not really. I was a man of science, a physicist who dealt in probabilities and measurable phenomena. So when I moved into that old Victorian...

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The Marble at Midnight

The house on Hemlock Lane was a compact bungalow, brick-faced and unassuming, sitting in a cul-de-sac where every lawn was a perfect green square. I’d moved there for the quiet,...

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The Clockwork Moth

I am writing this on the back of a receipt I found in my coat pocket, because I need to leave a record for my best friend, who is sitting...

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The Last Call at the Rusty Nail

I’d been tending bar at the Rusty Nail for almost two years, and I’d learned the boss’s golden rule the hard way: never refuse a drink. It was a small,...

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The Porcelain Throne

I never believed in ghosts until the summer I turned twenty-one, when my fiancé, Marcus, and I spent a week at his grandmother’s remote farmhouse in the dry, dusty hills...

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The Visitor at 3:33

Marta had always been a light sleeper, but lately, sleep felt like a distant memory. The weight of her life pressed down on her chest like a concrete slab: her...

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The Marigold Mat

The old farmhouse had settled into its bones by the time we moved in. Dust motes danced in the slanted afternoon light, and the floorboards complained with every step. My...

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The Pale Dust Impressions

I was thirteen when my best friend, Marta, invited me to stay the night at her family’s farmhouse. It was a sprawling, ivy-choked place on the edge of a town...

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The Door That Wasn’t

Mara had always been a vivid dreamer, but the night she dreamed of the house on Larkspur Lane, she knew something was wrong. It was her grandmother’s house, but the...

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The Crayon Door

The house on Maple Lane had a peeling white porch and a yard that seemed to swallow light. We moved in when I was five and my brother Eli was...

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The Ceiling’s Rhythm

The month was June, and the monsoon had hit the city of Verana with a vengeance. Three days of relentless downpour had turned streets into rivers and gutters into rapids....

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The Tune of the Other Room

I was eleven when I fell in love with the dusty records my grandfather left behind. The scratchy waltzes and mournful nocturnes became my secret world, a world I wanted...

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The Muffled Pop

It was a humid Tuesday in late August when I moved into the old Verity House, a sprawling Victorian that had been on the market for years. The realtor, a...

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The Boy Who Counted the Floorboards

I’m seventy-three now, and my house has never been a peaceful place. After my husband passed, I thought the quiet would be a relief, but the silence only made room...

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The Chrome Leviathan

In the autumn of 1995, I was a freshman at Redwood High, and my brother, Jake, was a senior. He and his friends were inseparable, a pack of leather-clad riders...

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The Muddy Apron

The summer I turned twelve, my father drove me to my Aunt Mirren’s farmhouse in the hills of West Virginia. I was to spend a week with my six-year-old cousin,...

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The Keys of the Far Gate

Sunday, October 12, 2014, began like any other autumn day in the town of Coldbrook, where the leaves had turned brittle and the wind carried a metallic tang from the...

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The Sunken Grove

The summer I turned ten, we moved to a house on the edge of a reservoir that had been carved out of the old forest. It was a dry year,...

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The Lockbox of Celluloid

My father was a locksmith for a sprawling film studio, a place where the air smelled of ozone and old wood, and the sounds of clapperboards and distant screams were...

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The Maplewood Chair

Last summer, two years after my father left, my mother insisted we take a trip to her sister’s farm in rural Vermont. It was the Fourth of July, and she...

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The Sigil of the Third Hollow

The old cemetery sprawled across from my apartment building like a gray, forgotten quilt. It wasn’t just any cemetery; it was the one with the iron gates that never quite...

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The Hollow Man of Kettle Falls

On the first Tuesday of October, just before dawn, the fog rolled off the river and wrapped itself around Kettle Falls like a wet shroud. I had been living in...

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The Last Ferry at Dusk

I never thought much of the old wharf, the one that jutted out into the gray, restless water like a broken finger. I’d grown up in the small coastal town...

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