Ghost stories from Colorado

The Unseen Weight

I’m Maya, fourteen years old, and I live in a small apartment on the fifth floor of a building in a bustling city, but my room overlooks a quiet, forgotten...

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The Hollow Crown

Last February, the abandoned quarry outside of town had frozen over, forming a treacherous, glittering basin that rose into a jagged pinnacle at its center. My cousin, Maya, and I...

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The Last Gate

The old house on Hemlock Lane had always been a quiet sort of place, the kind that settled around you like a worn blanket. When my daughter, Mira, was born,...

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The Photograph in the Attic

It was the summer of 2004, and my nieces, Lily and Sophie, were playing in my old attic bedroom. The house had been in our family for generations, and the...

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The Slate Creek Sessions

The summer of ’85 in Slate Creek, Ohio, was a stagnant pond of humidity and boredom. My sister Melanie and I had just survived our parents’ bitter divorce, and the...

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The Long Ascent

The last time I saw Elias, he was standing at the foot of my bed, a faint shimmer in the moonlight. That was three weeks ago, and I’ve since learned...

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The Lantern of the Hollow Hour

I’m Ellis, and for the past few months, life had been a quiet blur of late-night drives and shared earbuds with my partner, Mira. We’d moved into a creaky Victorian...

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The Red Gravel Path

The clock on my nightstand glowed 2:31 in sickly green numbers, and my nose was bleeding. Not a trickle—a steady, deliberate leak that soaked through tissue after tissue, staining my...

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The Static Garden

My name is Lena, and I have a problem. It’s not the kind of problem you can see, or touch, or even explain to a therapist without them slowly backing...

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The Persistence of Static

I’ve always been a skeptic, even after everything that happened at my grandmother’s cabin. But now, after this weekend, I’m not sure I can ever look at a television the...

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The Last Herd of the Salt Flats

I was born and raised in the high desert of Nevada, where the alkali flats stretch like bone-white oceans and the town of Drywell huddles against the interstate like a...

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The Cinder Hill Goat Shed

The old Blackwell place sat at the end of Cinder Hill Road, a name that felt too neat for a farm that had burned down twice. The first fire, back...

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The Hollow Rapping

The night air hung thick with the scent of pine and damp earth, pressing against the windows of our cabin like a curious intruder. It was the third night in...

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The Droning in the Ductwork

For my thirty-second birthday, I convinced my girlfriend, Mara, to join me for a weekend getaway in the bustling city of Ashford. We had booked a room in the grand,...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Lament

The night air was thick with the scent of rain-soaked pine and damp earth as I lay in my narrow bed, the steady rhythm of my breath the only sound...

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The Quartz Vein

My wife Lena and I had been sous chefs at a trendy bistro in downtown Portland for years, but our real lives began at home with our eight-month-old son, Milo....

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The Cold Keychain

After the accident, I thought I’d lost touch with Lena forever. She’d been my anchor through college, the one who’d drag me out of my shell and into the chaos...

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The Silent Turn

I never believed in haunted objects until the day my sister came screaming out of her room, clutching a mask that seemed to shift in her hands. It was a...

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The Bruise That Remembered

In the autumn of 2011, I lived in a converted warehouse in Portland, Oregon—a labyrinth of exposed brick and iron beams, where the shadows always seemed to lean a little...

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The Water Knobs

In the autumn of 1987, my family rented a small, sagging farmhouse on the outskirts of a town that no longer exists. It was a temporary arrangement, a waypoint until...

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The Cinder Box

It began with the kitchen clock. A tick that wasn’t ours, a rhythm that didn’t match the steady sweep of the second hand. We’d moved into the old farmhouse three...

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The Cold Typewriter

I never believed in ghosts until I moved into the old farmhouse on Hemlock Road. The place had been empty for years, and the realtor just gave me a nervous...

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The Ceramic Tulips

After my grandfather passed, I inherited his old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, a place I hadn’t visited since I was a kid. My friend Leo, a skeptic with...

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The Chill in the Chlorine

The summer I turned sixteen, I spent every day at the municipal pool. It was a sprawling complex of concrete and turquoise tiles, tucked behind the old high school, and...

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