Ghost stories from Connecticut

The Static Between Rooms

When I was a baby, my mother would place me in my crib with a baby monitor on the nightstand. She said that every time she left the room, the...

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The Watchmaker’s Favor

I started staying over at Elias’s place during the long, rain-heavy autumn. His house was a converted Victorian on the edge of town, with peeling wallpaper and a furnace that...

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The Leaf-Fall Watcher

In the late summer of 2005, I was sitting on the old, weathered trampoline in my friend Maya’s backyard. Her cousin Rachel had come to stay for the week, and...

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The Salt Path

In the faded autumn of 1997, I was nineteen, living in the flat farmlands of southern Nebraska, where the horizon stretched like a taut wire and the cornfields whispered with...

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The Hollow Man of Dead Man’s Drop

Last October, I decided to take a breather from the city and visit my cousin’s cabin on the edge of the Ponderosa Pines. The air was crisp with the scent...

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The Concrete Shelf

The day I moved into the bungalow on Killdeer Lane, the realtor handed me the keys with a nervous smile. She said the last family had moved out in a...

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The Hill’s Hollow

The summer I turned nine, my family moved into a house that squatted at the bottom of a long, winding hill. The structure itself was old, built sometime in the...

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The Last Tenant

The last day of school in late May felt like a forgery. The sun was too bright, the air too sweet, and all I could think about was the sprawling...

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The Ninth Day of Rain

The rain had not stopped for nine days. It drummed against the tin roof of our cabin like a patient percussionist, each drop a note in a symphony of monotony....

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The Hollow Oak Vigil

When I was six, I almost died. The doctors called it a peculiar strain of pneumonia, but my grandmother called it ‘the wasting.’ I remember the fever dreams, the cold...

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The Light That Knew My Name

I was nine when we moved to the old farmhouse on the edge of the Nebraska plains, a place my mother had inherited from a great-uncle she never spoke of....

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The Pale Passenger of Old Hollow Road

I was eleven the summer we moved to my grandmother’s house in the foothills of the Cascades, a place where the forest pressed close against the roads, and the only...

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The Third Sock

My father, Harold, was a man of routine. Every evening, after supper, he’d descend the half-finished stairs to the basement, where the old television flickered in the gloom. He’d settle...

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The Watcher by the Stove

In the old farmhouse we rented on the edge of the marsh, the kitchen was the heart of the home, but it was also the threshold of something else. The...

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The Hollow Tread

Every night at 3:15 AM, the floorboards in the hallway outside my bedroom begin their mournful song. I know the sound intimately—the way the third plank from the bathroom door...

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The Hollow Steps

The clock on the nightstand glowed 1:47 a.m. when I announced I needed to use the bathroom. My friends, sprawled across the sleeping bags in the backyard of my uncle’s...

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The Jar in the Attic

My family’s Victorian farmhouse sat at the edge of a sprawling, overgrown orchard, its paint peeling like dead skin and its windows staring out like hollow eyes. I was born...

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The Twelfth Stroke

The old grandfather clock in the hallway had been a fixture in my family’s house for generations, its brass pendulum swinging with a solemn, steady rhythm. I never paid it...

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The Clockwork Pendulum

Six months ago, I bought a pendulum from a dusty antique shop tucked between a laundromat and a boarded-up theatre. The owner, a gaunt woman with eyes the color of...

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The Dresser’s Debt

I have never been a believer. Not in ghosts, not in spirits, not in the lingering echoes of the dead. But there are things that happened to my brother, Samuel,...

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The Laughing Receiver

I had always dismissed the creaks and groans of my great-grandfather’s farmhouse as the natural settling of a century-old structure. The attic, sealed shut since before I was born, was...

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House of Forgotten Stories

One quiet evening, Mira decided to entertain herself by calling her home phone from her mobile. It was just a silly idea to hear her own voice echoing back at...

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The Midnight Pressure

I could not tell if I was deep in a dream or if something real was happening. Three evenings past, I woke from sleep to find a heavy weight pushing...

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The Dough Presser

I didn’t think much of it at first. The pressure on my face was like a firm hand, but not painful—just insistent, as if someone were trying to mold me...

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