Ghost stories from Florida

The Cellar Man

Dr. Evan Marsh had always prided himself on rationality. As an emergency room physician, he dealt in facts, in measurable data, in cause and effect. When he and his wife,...

Read Story →

The Copper Key

The house on Bramble Lane was a fixer-upper that my parents bought for a song, but it sang back in ways we didn’t expect. It was a Victorian with peeling...

Read Story →

The Hollow Harvest

I’ve always been the kind of person who finds a crowded room as inviting as a coffin lid. Crowds make my skin crawl, my heart race, and my thoughts scatter...

Read Story →

The Third Floor Tenant

Three weeks ago, on a Tuesday afternoon, my partner Leo and I were halfway through a late lunch when the sound came again. It wasn’t loud, not like footsteps overhead...

Read Story →

The Bone Gate

I spent three nights at the Chartreuse House, a sprawling Victorian manor perched on a bluff above the iron-gray Atlantic. Built in the 1890s by a shipping magnate, it had...

Read Story →

The Ledger of Unfinished Rooms

The house on Hemlock Lane had never felt like ours, not truly. It was a Victorian relic with a porch that sagged like a tired mouth and windows that blinked...

Read Story →

The Yellow Door

My name is Lila, and for the past six months I’ve worked at Little Sprouts, a daycare tucked into a repurposed building on the edge of town. The structure itself...

Read Story →

The Weight of Unseen Things

I never planned to stay long at the house on Maple Lane. It was a temporary arrangement, a favor for a friend who needed a few weeks of company. The...

Read Story →

The Glass Door on the Bay

I never believed in ghosts, not really. I mean, I wanted to, especially after my grandma passed and then my mom. But wanting and believing are two different things, aren’t...

Read Story →

The Last Round

The smell of boiled cabbage and Pine-Sol was the first thing that hit you at the Happy Nest Daycare, a smell that clung to everything like a second skin. I...

Read Story →

The Last Place You Look

I’ve always been a barometer for the unseen. Not in the way of carnival psychics or ghost hunters with their gadgets; it’s more like a constant, low-level hum of the...

Read Story →

The Hare’s Ledger

In the autumn of 2011, my wife and I inherited a centuries-old farmhouse from her childless great-uncle. The place had been in his family since the 1800s, and it came...

Read Story →

The Bedrock of Salt Creek

My half-sister, Cora, is twelve years younger than me, and we share only our mother’s blood. Her father’s clan came from the red rock country of the Southwest, and she...

Read Story →

The Iron Gate’s Keeper

Marta had lived alone in the old farmhouse for three years, ever since her husband passed. It sat at the end of a long gravel drive, bordered by a rusted...

Read Story →

The Moth-Hour Visitor

In the autumn of 1994, I drove to a forgotten chapel in the hills of West Virginia, where my grandmother’s family had once gathered for a biannual reunion. The place...

Read Story →

The Weaver’s Throne

In the autumn of 2016, my daughter and I moved into a rundown farmhouse on the edge of the Cranberry Bog. The place had been abandoned for decades, and the...

Read Story →

The Unseen Watcher at the Glass Door

When I was fourteen, my family moved for the sixth time in as many years. This time, it was to a tidy two-bedroom cottage in a gated community near Lake...

Read Story →

The Farmhouse of Lingering Guests

My childhood home was a sprawling farmhouse in the middle of a cornfield, miles from any neighbor. It had been in our family for generations, but it always felt like...

Read Story →

The Waiting Hour

I’ve always known that the veil between worlds grows thin at dusk. My grandmother used to say that the in-between hours are when the dead and the restless take their...

Read Story →

The Hollow Man in the Pines

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been followed by a presence I can only describe as a hole in the world. The first time I saw it, I was...

Read Story →

The Man in the Wires

In the autumn of 2003, my cousin Kyle was twenty, two weeks shy of twenty-one. He and his older brother, Marcus, and Kyle’s girlfriend, Elena, had just pooled their savings...

Read Story →

The Algorithm of Static

The first time I noticed the pattern was in the static of a dead channel. I was fiddling with the old television in the basement of our new house—a sprawling,...

Read Story →

The Rotating Inventory

I’d been working the late shift at the Port Augustine Free Clinic for three years, and nights like this one made me wish I’d taken that job in the city....

Read Story →

The Night the Window Opened

It was late February, maybe the 27th or 28th, and the funeral for our little boy, Thomas, was set for early March. He had been four months old when the...

Read Story →