Ghost stories from California

The Stillness at 3:17

I never believed in the stillness of the house until that night. It was the summer of 2003, and my wife, Ellen, and I had just moved into a Victorian...

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The Thrown Bag

I’ve never been one to believe in ghosts, not really. But living in that old apartment on Hemlock Street, with its creaking floors and drafty windows, I started to question...

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The Constant Draft

My name is Elena, and this is my account. It began with a battered cardboard box we found in the attic of our new house, a place we’d rented sight...

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The Falling Blade

When I moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of Ellery Creek, I thought I’d found peace. The house was a two-story Victorian, peeling white paint, a wraparound porch,...

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The Lantern Moth

I met Elara during my first week in the old textile town of Blackwood. She worked at the only vintage shop that still had a working telephone, and her fingers...

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The Blanket That Remembers

Marta had always believed that the old farmhouse on Cedar Hollow Road held its breath. The creak of the floorboards, the sigh of the wind through the gaps in the...

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The Bouncing Ball of Briarwood Manor

In the waning days of October, when the leaves had turned to brittle browns and the wind carried the scent of decay, I convinced three of my friends—Mara, Theo, and...

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The Fourth Setting

Mara had never been one to dwell on the dead. But since her grandmother passed away eleven years ago, she found herself in a quiet, persistent dialogue with the memory...

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The Hollow Kiln

The winter of 1962 was cruel to the old brickworks. My grandmother, Elspeth, had settled us in the caretaker’s cottage on the edge of the abandoned factory, a sprawling complex...

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The Cold Draft

After a long shift at the diner, I dragged myself home, my bones aching and my mind buzzing with the usual post-work fog. The apartment was quiet, save for the...

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The Lantern Man

I never understood why my grandmother insisted on keeping a kerosene lantern in the attic. She said it was for ’emergencies,’ but the house had working electricity, and the old...

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The Unpainted Floor

I was eleven when my lungs decided to betray me. The doctors called it a severe case of pneumonia, but to me, it was just a long, boring stretch of...

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The Gravel Sifters

The summer air in Red Bluff, California, 1956, was thick with the smell of sunbaked dirt and wild sage. I was six, and the world was a vast, dusty playground...

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The Box in the Corner

I have been fascinated by the unexplained since childhood, but my encounters were always on guided trips to famous haunted sites, never in my own home. I never expected the...

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The Hollow Between Heartbeats

Mara had always been a light sleeper, but since the baby came, she’d learned to function on fumes. Tonight was no different. She’d clocked out of the diner at 11:47,...

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The Flooded Corner

In my mid-twenties, I was a restless soul, always chasing the next horizon. I’d been saving for months for a cross-country trip, and finally, the day came when I was...

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The Frequency of the First Light

In the autumn of 2011, I was a night-shift archivist at the Meridian Municipal Records Annex, a concrete tomb of forgotten documents on the outskirts of a town that prided...

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The Mannequin in the Mirror

The first day of summer school at Hemlock Valley High felt like a punishment, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong. My mom insisted it would ‘keep me out of...

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The Porcelain Hum

The cottage my grandmother left me sat at the edge of the marsh, a half-collapsed relic of her stubbornness. I’d moved there after the divorce, grateful for the cheap rent...

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The Greenhouse Vigil

In the autumn of 1984, my mother, Eleanor, passed away suddenly from a cerebral aneurysm. She was a botanist and had filled our Victorian home with hundreds of plants, from...

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The Peek

Milo and I moved to the outskirts of Redwood Creek with our five kids—two from his first marriage, two from mine, and our own little surprise. The house was a...

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The Knocking in the Walls

Maya had always been sensitive to the creaks and groans of old houses, but this was different. For the past two nights, a rhythmic pounding had sounded from the floor...

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The Sitter in the Ash

In the autumn of 2008, my partner, Elena, and I were moving into a century-old farmhouse on the outskirts of a small Minnesota town. The place had been abandoned for...

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The Inversion of Grace

My name is Elara, and I am twenty-four. I live in a small apartment above a laundromat in the city of New Carthage, a place that prides itself on its...

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