Ghost stories from Florida

The Glass That Never Stopped Moving

Some folks in the county still talk about the ruin of the old Faraday house, but they never say why it’s called a ruin when it’s still standing. They just...

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The Man in the Blue Jacket

The drive along Route 17 always felt like a concession to the wilderness. On one side, a sheer rock face, slick with seepage and moss, rose like a silent accusation....

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The Sunroom’s Last Bloom

I never believed in the weight of houses—how some places press down on you slowly, like a held breath, until you forget you ever breathed freely. My first house was...

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The Crossing Guard

It was the summer of 2019, and I was driving from my small apartment in Ocala to see my girlfriend, Maya, who was finishing her master’s at the University of...

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The Constant Companion

I’ve always been attuned to the unseen, the subtle hum of the world beyond. I can feel the cold spots in a warm room, hear the faint whispers in the...

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The Constant Gardener

My name is Eleanor, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve been drawn to the unknown, to the stories that prick the skin and linger in the dark...

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The Whistle of the Porcelain Doll

The old farmhouse on Hemlock Road had always been a place of quiet unease, but for my sister Clara, it was a nightly theater of dread. She was seventeen, back...

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The Bell Tower’s Ledger

The library closed at nine, but Martha had permission to stay until the clock struck eleven. The university’s special collections wing was her sanctuary—a maze of iron shelves and moth-scented...

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The Red Lantern

The house on Thornapple Lane was a Victorian relic, its bones creaking with age. I was eight when we moved in, and the first thing I noticed was the red...

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The Brass Keychain

The first time I heard it, I was alone in my aunt’s house in the lush green hills of Vermont. I’d just moved from New Jersey, leaving behind the crowded...

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The Red Gaze in the Sliding Door

I was seven years old, living in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in the outskirts of Sacramento, California, in the summer of 2005. The complex was old, with chipped paint and...

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The Granary’s Keeper

When I moved into the old carriage house behind the Wexler estate, I thought I was getting a steal. The rent was absurdly low for the small town of Millbrook,...

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The Salt Ring and the Broken Watch

The night of July 14th, 1991, was thick with humidity and the smell of rain that never came. I had just finished my shift at the all-night diner on the...

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The Thirteenth Listener

I never believed in anything beyond the tangible world, not after the things I saw as a kid that I couldn’t explain. But when you’re fourteen and invisible to everyone...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

I was a solitary practitioner then, six years into my path, living in the coastal town of Grayhaven. My craft was quiet, my tools simple. The pendulum I used was...

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The Blue Umbrella

The rain fell in sheets, tapping a frantic rhythm against the windows of my small apartment. I was watching the water snake down the glass, my mind a thousand miles...

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The Cloaked Listener

My mother still talks about the winter we spent in the old farmhouse, the one with the crooked porch and the pine trees that pressed against the windows like curious...

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The Salt in the Walls

The house I grew up in has always had a smell of damp earth and old wood, even on the sunniest days. When I moved back with my two children...

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The Serpent’s Blessing

The antique shop in Asheville, North Carolina, was a labyrinth of forgotten things. Dust motes danced in the slanted afternoon light as I, a recently widowed history professor named Elias...

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The Flicker at Hollow Creek

In the summer of 2008, my cousin Della and I were staying at our grandmother’s farmhouse near Hollow Creek, a speck on the map in eastern Kentucky. The night was...

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The Third Shift

The medical records archive at St. Jude’s wasn’t the sort of place you ended up by choice. It was a converted bomb shelter from the fifties, buried three stories beneath...

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The Palmetto House

The Palmetto House sat at the end of a dead-end street, its sagging porch and peeling paint a testament to decades of neglect. When I was nine, my father took...

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The Sixth Floor Ledger

For months, the archive room on the sixth floor of the municipal records building had been a place of comfort for me. Rows of metal shelving, the smell of old...

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The Copper Coil

In the autumn of 1967, I enrolled at Meridian Technical Institute, a sprawling campus nestled in the pine barrens of eastern Texas. I was a student of electromechanical systems, drawn...

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