Ghost stories from Colorado

The Painted Kettle

For as long as I can remember, I’ve spent Christmas Eve on the floor of my uncle’s cabin, wrapped in an old quilt that smelled of pine and woodsmoke. It...

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The Clearcut Hollow

In the autumn of 2016, my wife Lena and I packed our two boys into the truck and drove the winding gravel roads to the high country of the Blue...

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The Clay District’s Last Bus

The town of Ridgecrest sat in a narrow valley, its red-clay hills crumbling into the streets after every hard rain. The old mining road, now mostly forgotten, wound up through...

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The Ceramic Tooth

I never put much stock in the old man’s words. He was a Tlingit elder I met while hiking near Sitka, his face a weathered map of lines and his...

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The Clockwork Cascade

The night of the harvest moon, I returned home from the canning factory, my fingers still reeking of brine and copper. My husband, Elias, had already turned in, his gentle...

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The Porcelain Cavalry

The summer before sixth grade, our town’s library hosted a small fair, and among the stalls was a table of dusty trinkets. My best friends, Leo and Mara, and I...

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The Fifth Bell

Three years had passed since I last wrote anything. Life had moved me to a place that felt like a forgotten pocket of the world—a clearing carved into a dense...

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The Gatekeeper’s Vigil

The first snow of the season was already turning to gray slush along the curb when I pulled into the driveway of my late aunt’s house in the foothills of...

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The Harvest Festival Tapes

The summer I turned eight, my family moved to a dried-up farming town called Pemberton, where the cornfields stretched like a yellow sea and the only sound at night was...

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The Tuning of the Empty Room

In the autumn of that year, my cousin Lena and I moved into my grandmother’s old house on the edge of the Saltmarsh. The house had been in the family...

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The Red Hydrant’s Witness

The afternoon sun bled through the smog-choked sky, painting the intersection of Meridian and 12th in a jaundiced light. My ex-husband, Dale, was supposed to be at a diner across...

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The Gilded Door in the Wall

The summer before I turned sixteen, my family uprooted from the old Victorian that had nearly drained me dry. My mother’s company transferred her to a plant three states over,...

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The Lake of Drowned Pines

The day was October 17th, 2023, and I had always been drawn to the forgotten corners of the Pacific Northwest. My sister-in-law, Mara, and her husband, Theo, had booked a...

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The Velvet Room

When Marguerite checked into the Grand Meridian Hotel in the small mountain town of Aspen Creek, she felt a chill that had nothing to do with the altitude. The hotel,...

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The Face in the Window

I never told anyone about the face in the window. Not my mom, not my friends, not even my therapist. I figured they’d think I was crazy. But after what...

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The Bruise That Remembers

The old farmhouse on Marrow Lane had always felt like a living thing—creaking bones in its timbers, sighing breath through its loose windowpanes. Elara had lived there with her adoptive...

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The Porcelain Key

The day we moved into the old Beaumont House, the air inside smelled of dust and dried lavender, and every floorboard seemed to settle with a sigh. My husband, Callum,...

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The Porcelain Reflection

I was born with a shadow that didn’t belong to the light. It started with a chill, a sense of being watched in my own bedroom, but by the time...

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The Last Harvest of Lost Creek

In the fall of 1974, my father moved our family from the bustling streets of Wichita to a crumbling farmstead forty miles from the nearest gas station in the panhandle...

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The Hollow Mannequin

It has been exactly one year since I last typed a single word on this site. A year of silence, of hiding, of pretending that the knot in my chest...

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The Folded Napkin

The drive from the coast to the high desert took the better part of two days, and by the time I pulled into Aunt Hester’s gravel lot, the sky was...

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The Uninvited Breakfast Guest

I wake at 5:30, the hour when the house is still breathing in its sleep. The alarm clock glows green, and the silence is thick enough to slice. My cat,...

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The Salted Ward

My grandmother passed in the withering heat of that July, leaving behind a house that smelled of mothballs and old paper. I inherited her journals, bound in cracked leather, and...

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The Constant Companion

Margaret had always been a practical woman, but even she couldn’t ignore the pattern. It started in the small apartment on Hemlock Street, where she and her husband, Daniel, had...

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