Ghost stories from Florida

The Frost in the Hallway

When my daughter Maya was three, we rented a rambling old farmhouse on the edge of a dying town in upstate New York. It was cheap, and with my husband...

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The Man with the Amber Eyes

I had never given much thought to the afterlife. Death was just a word, a concept that adults whispered about when they thought I wasn’t listening. At twelve, my world...

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The Weight of Unseen Air

Three months had passed since we traded the suffocating walls of our apartment for the creaking bones of a two-story Victorian on Maple Street. My name is Lena, and at...

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The Hollow Man of Room 14

Every July, like clockwork, my family traded the gray hum of our inland town for the salt-bleached boardwalks of Crescent Cove. The motel was called the Sandpiper, a modest two-story...

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The Man Who Smelled Like Rain

I’m Elara, and I’m seventeen now, but this happened when I was fifteen, about nine months ago. I still can’t be sure if it was a dream or real, but...

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The Static Visitor

I was staying at my aunt’s farmhouse in the middle of North Dakota, helping her pack up after my uncle’s funeral. It was a sprawling, drafty place, all creaking floorboards...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

I was eight when I first saw my great-aunt Marta after her funeral. She stood at the foot of my bed, her fingers brushing the quilt my mother had sewn,...

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The Pale Passage

On a damp April morning, Delia stood at the kitchen sink of her rented farmhouse, scrubbing oatmeal from a pan. Her son, Milo, was hunched over the counter, spreading butter...

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The Amber Portal and the Waking Hollow

Mara first noticed it on a Tuesday, three weeks after she moved into the converted lighthouse on Porphyry Point. The keeper’s quarters had been modernized—white walls, minimalist furniture—but the winding...

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The Language of the Unremembered

Two nights ago, I fell asleep on the couch around seven in the evening, exhausted from a long shift at the factory. The next thing I knew, it was ten,...

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The Hollow Gaze

My aunt’s cottage, nestled deep in the woods of Pine Hollow, had always felt like a place outside of time. The walls were dressed in dark, crooked timbers, and the...

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The Constant Hum

My name is Elara, and I’ve always been attuned to things others aren’t. It started as a child, with a persistent humming in my ears that never quite went away,...

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The Stucco Cracks

I was fifteen the summer we moved into the Cattail Arms, a squat, mustard-colored building on the edge of Albuquerque that smelled of burnt dust and mothballs. My mother, my...

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The Dust on the Staircase

My grandmother’s house sat at the end of a gravel lane in the pine barrens of New Jersey, a place where the trees grew so thick that the sun only...

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The Stairwell Visitor

My earliest memory is of the stairwell. Not the stairs themselves, but the space between the steps and the ceiling, a triangle of dimness that smelled of old wood and...

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The Sugar Bowl Incident

It all started with a sugar bowl. Not the porcelain kind your grandmother kept on her counter, but the kind that lives in the back of your pantry, gathering dust...

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The Winter Reap

The swamp had a way of holding onto the cold, even when the rest of the world promised a warm front. In late February of 1991, I found myself standing...

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The Sunroom Visitor

The alarm on Elara’s phone blared at 6:00 AM, jolting her from a restless sleep. Beside her, Rhys stirred, his arm tightening around her swollen belly for a moment before...

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The Thermos in the Icebox

The first time I felt the cold, it was just a tickle at the back of my neck, like someone breathing on me while I stared into the fridge. We...

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The Rooted House

My earliest memory isn’t of a face or a voice, but of a weight pressing on my chest, like someone heavy was sitting on me while I slept. I couldn’t...

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The Static in the Snow

The house at 17 Juniper Lane was a postcard from a forgotten winter, its white clapboards sagging under a weight of snow that never seemed to melt. My sister Mara...

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The Glass Veil

The house on Birchwood Lane was a two-story Victorian with peeling paint and a porch that sagged like a tired jaw. My family had moved there the summer I turned...

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The Glass Marble

I never believed in the supernatural until the night I found a glass marble in my childhood bedroom. It was the summer I turned twelve, and my family had just...

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The Hand on the Bog

I was twenty-seven when my grandmother died and left me her cottage in the marshlands of coastal Georgia. I had grown up in Ohio, but after years of city noise...

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