Ghost stories from Florida

The Spice Shelf Shift

The old farmhouse had always breathed. When I was a boy, I’d lie in bed and listen to its timbers groan and settle, imagining it was a great beast slowly...

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The Last Porch Light

The summer of 2019, I was driving from Arizona to Montana to see my father for the second time in my life. I was twenty-six, and my son, Leo, was...

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The Marigold Gate

I never believed in the stories my mother told until she told me this one, and I saw the scar on her palm. It was a thin, white line, like...

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The Hollow Room

Marlowe had always prided herself on her rational mind, a fortress of logic in a world of superstition. But that fortress had begun to show cracks ever since she started...

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The Kettle’s Whistle

The house on Bramble Lane had a way of keeping time that had nothing to do with clocks. It was in the creak of the floorboards at 3 a.m., the...

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The Keepsake Under the Dust

The blue house at the end of Culver Lane had a particular hum in its floorboards, a sound like a trapped bee vibrating beneath the linoleum. It wasn’t a constant...

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The Static in the Walls

In the autumn of 2006, at twelve, I moved with my mother and grandmother into my great-grandmother’s peeling Victorian house at the edge of a dying orchard. Great-Grandma Elsie was...

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The Cartographer’s Room

Mara had never been a believer in the supernatural. She was a data analyst, a woman of numbers and patterns, and the world, for her, was a series of predictable...

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The Cartographer’s Ledger

I have never been one to believe in ghosts. I’ve always chalked up spectral sightings to overactive imaginations, faulty wiring, or the tricks of low light. I thought the dead...

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The Cinder-Faced Visitor

The summer I turned twelve, my father’s job transferred us to a dusty little town called Barrow Creek, out where the highways fray into gravel and the sky presses down...

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The Hollow Man in the Pines

I have always been prone to seeing shapes in the corner of my eye, but these past few months, the shapes have started to linger. It began after we moved...

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The Last Broadcast

The static hummed, a low, electric thrum that had become the soundtrack of my evenings. It was the only sound that drowned out the empty rooms of the house I’d...

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The Morning Visitor

In the summer of 2019, I was living with my mother in a small, weather-beaten house on the outskirts of a town called Stillwater. My father had passed away two...

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The Loom of Sorrow

I’m writing this from a motel room off Route 9, the kind with a flickering neon sign that buzzes like an angry hornet. My hands are still shaking. I need...

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The Mannequin’s Fingers

I was thirteen when my grandmother passed, leaving me her antique shop in the sleepy town of Grey Hollow. I say ‘leaving me’ but it was more like a burden—a...

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The Undelivered Manuscript

My first night at Thornewood Hall, I blamed the old pipes for the clattering that woke me just past midnight. The dormitory, once a grand hotel for railroad magnates, had...

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The Groaning in the Wall

The Becker family had finally traded their cramped city apartment for a stately Victorian in the quiet town of Ashford. The house, with its peeling wallpaper and creaking floorboards, felt...

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The Red Balloon in the Salt Flats

In the summer of 1998, when I was nine, my great-aunt Edna had a stroke and was hospitalized. My family lived in Nebraska, and we had planned a trip to...

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The Fern-Line Witness

The summer I turned seven, my mother and I moved into a sagging blue house at the edge of the Ponderosa Pines, a community carved out of the woods like...

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The Hall of Blinking Mirrors

Marla, a 23-year-old graphic designer, had just moved into a charming but old townhouse in the historic district of a city she had only recently known. She was not superstitious,...

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Strange Occurence

This is the second time I have had an experience like the one I am about to tell. Strange things seem to happen around or close to my birthday. Yesterday,...

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Held Down And Abused By A Demon Figure

I’m kind of embarrassed by my experiences. Well this has happened multiple times. I’m new to this but I’ve read stories and similar things have happened to me. I’ll be...

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The Draft Under the Door

I’ve been living in this old farmhouse for about three years now, and I’ve never had reason to question its quirks. The floorboards creak in the hallway no matter how...

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The Yellow Umbrella

The rain in Port Angeles was a constant, drizzling gray that seeped into your bones. For Clara, it was a mirror to the grief that had settled there after her...

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