The Hollow Between Heartbeats
At fifteen, I’ve cataloged every flicker of the peripheral, every warm breath on the back of my neck when I’m alone, every shadow that moves against the current of the...
At fifteen, I’ve cataloged every flicker of the peripheral, every warm breath on the back of my neck when I’m alone, every shadow that moves against the current of the...
Nadia had always felt the house was too quiet. At nineteen, she was used to her parents’ frequent business trips, leaving her alone in the sprawling, modern home they’d moved...
I was seven when the summer heat settled over our trailer park like a wet wool blanket, and the tin roof of our single-wide contracted with a series of pops...
My name is Elias Thorne, and I have been leading the haunted history tours in the town of Millbrook since the summer of 2007. Millbrook is a quaint, picture-postcard town...
Mara had always been attuned to the unseen, but it wasn’t until her thirteenth summer that she began to feel the cold. Not the chill of a draft, but a...
On the last Friday of August in 1997, I walked into the cavernous superstore on the outskirts of a town called Millbrook, a place that seemed to exist only for...
The shift at the canning factory had been brutal, the kind that left your ears ringing and your hands smelling of brine and metal. I got home to my basement...
My family’s arrival in Okinawa was meant to be an adventure, a fresh start under a foreign sun. My father, a civil engineer, had been assigned to a three-year project...
Elara had always been sensitive. As a child, she’d seen things that others couldn’t, felt vibrations in the air that others dismissed as imagination. But it wasn’t until she moved...
The summer I turned five, we lived in the Brickworks, a cluster of rust-colored tenements that crouched at the edge of the city like a wound that wouldn’t heal. The...
The old frame house sagged at the edge of Cedar Hollow, a town of mill houses strung along the Blackwood River like beads on a snapped necklace. We moved in...
I have always been able to see the five. They are not ghosts, not in the traditional sense. They are more like water stains on the wallpaper of reality, visible...
At 2:54 AM, the house on Hemlock Lane sat silent, save for the occasional creak of old timbers settling. Jules and her best friend, Callie, had been sneaking out for...
Mara and I had been married for twelve years, and in all that time, I never once doubted her sanity. She was the anchor in our relationship, the one who...
Our apartment occupied the lower floor of a sprawling, timber-framed house that had once been the heart of a small settlement in the foothills of the Appalachians. The upper floor...
I have always been a devout man, my faith as solid as the old oak pews in the little chapel my grandmother took me to as a child. That faith...
My name is Margaret, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of the dark. Not the absence of light, but the presence of something in that...
The old farmhouse on Larkspur Lane had always been a quiet place, save for the wind that moaned through the eaves. My bedroom was at the end of the upstairs...
The first time I heard them, I was halfway through a bag of stale pretzels, sprawled on the living room couch at 11:47 PM. The house—a creaking Victorian my aunt...
The summer I turned fifteen, my family moved into a house that sat at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by a forest that seemed to lean in too...
Before I was born, my great-uncle Elias died. He was burned alive in a transformer explosion while repairing a substation on the edge of my great-grandmother’s farm in the Texas...
In the autumn of 2004, my family gathered at my grandfather’s dilapidated farmhouse in rural Kansas, a place out of time with its peeling wallpaper and creaking floors. Grandfather had...
It all started in the summer of 1988, when I was nine, living in a small, sleepy town in Ohio. My family had just moved into an old Victorian house...
It began with a rusted key found in the floorboards of the old boathouse, not with any grand plan. My friends and I—Elena, Marcus, Theo, and I—were part of the...
Listening to the woods...
🕯 Log in to view your wish history and Willow's responses.
LOG IN TO THE WOODS