Ghost stories from Georgia

The Gilded Procedure

In the stifling heat of a late August afternoon, I lay in my dorm room, the blinds drawn against the amber sun. I was a senior now, but the room...

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The Hollow at the Edge of the Woods

The summer I turned six, we lived in a house that leaned against the forest like a tired traveler against a tree. The porch steps groaned under my weight, and...

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The Salt Marsh Portrait

In the autumn of 1967, I was seeing a man named Elias from the town of Dunmore, nestled in the misty lowlands of the Chesapeake Bay. Our attraction was immediate,...

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The Crawlspace of December 27th

Let me introduce myself. I’m Daniel, born in 1991 in a dusty little town in New Mexico. I lost my parents and my sister before I turned twenty, so I...

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The Glass Antenna

In the frozen February of 2015, I was a widow at forty-two. My husband, Elias, had taken his own life in the barn behind our farmhouse in rural Minnesota, leaving...

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The Bone Warden of Cedar Lane

The first winter we spent in Ohio was harsh, but nothing compared to the chill that settled in our bones when we finally moved into the house on Cedar Lane....

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The Candle That Wouldn’t Light

The storm had knocked out the power across the whole block, and my house felt like a tomb. I fumbled through the dark to my room, where a single candle...

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The Blue Moth Appointment

The morning was ordinary, draped in the gray flannel of a sky too tired to decide. My neighbor, Mrs. Elara Voss, had a doctor’s appointment across town in the district...

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The Listener

I was house-sitting my aunt’s farmhouse near the Nebraska panhandle that winter, a bleak stretch of prairie that seemed to swallow the horizon. The house was a 1920s two-story with...

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The Hollow Note

Mara transferred to Ridgemont University mid-year, a sprawling campus carved into a gray New England valley. She’d left behind a messy breakup and a string of failed classes, hoping the...

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The Blackberry Tunnel

In the fall of 1996, I was sixteen, and my best friend, Danny, lived on a dead-end gravel road called Old Mill Lane, just outside of a small town in...

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The Umbrella Carrier

It was the tail end of October, and the last of the amber light was bleeding through the blinds of my apartment in the quiet coastal town of Saltbreeze. My...

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The Static Garden

Elara Meeks had always considered herself a skeptic, even as a child. She lived in the sprawling, fog-drenched town of Ravenshade, where the old oaks whispered and the bay kept...

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The Hour of the Unfinished

The house on Meridian Lane had a way of keeping time, even when the clocks stopped. We’d lived there for eight years, and in all that time, the radiators clanked...

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The Marble in the Dryer

The house on Maple Hollow Lane was brand new when I moved in during the autumn of 1997. Fresh paint, shiny floors, and that faint smell of new carpet. I...

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The Hollow Oak

I was twelve when we moved to the farm, a tired stretch of land in the shadow of the Blue Ridge. My mother had inherited it from her grandfather, and...

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The Aiken Ledger

My family never talked about the dead. In our house, death was a door that closed, and the soul walked straight into the light—no lingering, no looking back. That was...

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The Last Bell at Hollow Creek

My grandmother, Elena, was from the deep, dark woods of the Appalachian foothills. She lived a life of subsistence—tending a few scrawny goats, a vegetable patch, and a rusted bell...

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The Ivy-Covered Porch

It was the summer of ’89 when my husband and I moved into the old Weatherby place. The realtor called it ‘quaint,’ but what it really was, was a relic...

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The Finger’s Keeper

I’ve spent forty-seven years on this earth, and if there’s one regret I carry like a stone in my shoe, it’s selling the house on Thornfield Lane. It wasn’t the...

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The Lighthouse Keeper’s Ledger

Five years had slipped by like grains of sand through an hourglass, and for that, I offer my sincerest apologies. The time away has not been idle; it has been...

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The Gravity of Static

The old mill town of Ashwick had a charm that felt almost synthetic, like a movie set built for tourists. My sister, Clara, and I had taken the evening tour...

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The Satin Dolls’ Vigil

The house on Birchwood Lane had a way of breathing. It sighed through the floorboards and whispered through the walls, but we never noticed until it was too late. I...

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The Static in the Window

The winter sky was a pale, sickly white, and the world outside my window was a hushed, muffled expanse of snow. I was eleven, and we’d just moved to a...

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