Ghost stories from Florida

The Lantern Man of the Salt Marshes

I’ve told this story to exactly one person, my sister, and she made me promise never to speak of it again. But the weight of it has grown too heavy,...

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The Weight of Unseen Eyes

I’ve always been able to feel things others can’t—not see them, but sense them. As a child, I thought it was just an overactive imagination, a trick of the dark....

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The Hollow Harvest

The old cranberry bog had been in our family for three generations, a sprawling, muddy expanse that turned crimson every autumn. My father, a taciturn man with calloused hands, oversaw...

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The Weave of Nine-Thirty-Five

It had been a long week of double shifts at the grain silo, and Miriam had simply collapsed into bed, not even bothering to change out of her work clothes....

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The Fifth Floor

Margaret had lived in the Langford Arms since the year the cherry trees along the boulevard first bloomed. The old building, with its creaking elevator and peeling wallpaper, had always...

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The Glass Station

The first time I saw the man in the glass, I was eight years old, standing at the window of our apartment in the coastal town of Drayburn. It was...

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The Current Beneath

My grandmother’s lake house had a rickety wooden dock that stretched into water the color of weak tea. I was maybe seven, and my cousin Elsie and I were forbidden...

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The Dollhouse in the Attic

Growing up, my brother Eli and I were raised by our grandparents on their farm, a sprawling property with a rusted windmill and a barn that leaned like a tired...

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The Pajama Man

I’ve never considered myself psychic. No premonitions, no visions, just a family tree that’s a little crooked. My great-aunt Mildred used to swear she saw her dead husband in the...

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The Drowned Cartographer’s Ledger

The dreams began in the autumn of 2014, when I was still a ghost drifting through my own life. I’d wake gasping, the phantom chill of deep water clinging to...

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The Lantern’s Last Passenger

My brother, Dale, had a peculiar hobby: he set up trail cameras in the most unexpected places, hoping to catch wildlife or perhaps something stranger. Last spring, he mounted one...

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The Amber Room

My first memory of the house on Mulberry Lane is the smell of damp plaster and old wood, a scent that clung to the walls like a second skin. I...

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The Hollow Man of Ward 8

I was stretched across the motel bed, the cheap floral bedspread scratching my arms through the thin cotton of my shirt. I wasn’t asleep, just letting the hum of the...

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The Polished Surface

I first noticed the changes three weeks after I moved into my aunt’s old house in the dusty outskirts of Cray’s Hollow. The place had been vacant for years, and...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Hour

My name is Elias, and I am twenty-one now, a signal technician for the railway, a job that keeps me on the move. I never believed in hauntings, not until...

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The Salt Line

The house on Maribel Lane had always felt like a lung breathing in the humid Florida night. I was staying with my Abuela Rosa, and the place was bustling with...

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The Kitchen Light

In the autumn of 2006, I was nineteen, round with my first child, and living in my grandmother’s old farmhouse on the edge of a nowheresville town in Nebraska. The...

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The Bone Lattice

Marta had always been a light sleeper, a habit from her childhood in a creaking farmhouse. So when she stirred at 3:17 AM in Leo’s sterile apartment, she wasn’t alarmed....

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The Citrus Hollow Sign

The town of Cinder Creek was a patchwork of old citrus groves and cracked asphalt, where the scent of rotting oranges hung in the air like a forgotten hymn. I...

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The Tenant of Crag’s Rest

Last summer, I rented a remote cottage named Crag’s Rest from a reclusive woman named Mrs. Holloway. The address was a blur of rural roads and pine forests, and I...

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The Iron Lung

The old mining infirmary sat at the edge of town, a skeletal husk of brick and rusted iron. Locals whispered about the influenza outbreak of 1918, how the sick were...

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The Wall-Dweller

The house on Hemlock Lane was the kind that settled into your bones like a damp chill, a place where the floorboards sang their own creaking lullabies at night. I...

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The Salt-Rotten Gate

I never told anyone about the dreams. Not my husband, not my sister, not the few friends I’d kept since high school. The dreams started when I was twelve, the...

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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,...

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