Ghost stories from Georgia

The Hollow Between

The week had been a blur of deadlines and traffic, so when my partner, Ellis, and I finally stumbled through the door of our rented farmhouse, all we wanted was...

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The Knocking in the Walls

My grandmother used to say I was ‘thin-skinned’ in a way that had nothing to do with bruises or cuts. She meant I was a doorway, a place where the...

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The Feather in the Ash

My grandmother, Nana Lila, used to tell me stories under the wide Montana sky, her voice like wind through dry grass. She was a quarter Blackfoot, and her tales were...

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The Grain in the Walls

The old farmhouse sat at the end of a gravel road that dissolved into weeds, its white paint peeling like sunburned skin. I’d moved in with my grandmother after my...

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The Persimmon Tree Visitor

When I was a kid, my Aunt Ruth was my entire world. She wasn’t just the aunt who showed up at every school play and soccer game; she was the...

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The Groaning of the Rafters

In the autumn of 1887, the McKay family moved into a sprawling stone farmhouse on the edge of the marshlands. It was a house that seemed to lean into the...

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The String in the Dark

The night shift at St. Jude’s Memorial had a rhythm, a certain heartbeat that thrummed through the fluorescent-lit corridors. I clocked in at 11 PM, and the charge nurse, Margaret,...

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The Cartographer’s Door

The night shift at St. Aurelia’s Rehab wing was quiet, the kind of quiet that made you hear your own heartbeat. I’d been a nurse for twelve years, and the...

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The Breathing in the Leaves

The old farmhouse sat at the end of a gravel drive that wound through a dense stand of pines. It had been in our family for generations, but we’d only...

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The Unopened Gate

It was a sweltering July afternoon, and the cicadas were already buzzing their droning song. My sister Mia, my brother Leo, and I were bored, our usual summer activities played...

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The Paper Visitor

My grandmother used to say that the dead cling to the living like wet leaves to a shoe. She taught me to see them, to read the ripples they left...

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The House at the End of Willow Creek

In 2007, my father’s job transfer forced us to leave the sun-soaked streets of San Diego for the humid, pine-choked outskirts of a small town in Alabama. I was seventeen,...

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The Familiar Silhouette

Mara had been scrolling through her phone at the kitchen table, the glow of the screen casting pale light on her tired face. The house was quiet, save for the...

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The Cupboard Key

The first time I felt it, I was unpacking my grandmother’s china in the new flat. We’d moved in with Mum after the divorce, my brother Leo and I, and...

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The Moisture in the Walls

I’ve always prided myself on being a rational man. Numbers, logic, cause and effect—that’s how I navigated the world. So when I moved into the old Harbinger House, the realtor’s...

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The Coffee Mug of the Returned

My wife, Elena, and I had been married for seven years, but I never met her father. He passed away in the autumn of 2002, when she was just nineteen....

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The Constant in the Cellar

In the autumn of 2019, my wife and I bought our first house: a narrow, two-story Victorian on the edge of the old industrial district of Meridian, Mississippi. It was...

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The Dryer’s Open Door

My name is Ellen, and after the divorce, I found myself in a cramped two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a building that smelled of boiled cabbage and old...

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The Oatfield Vigil

My first brush with the unseen happened when I was eight, in the autumn of 1997, in a single-wide trailer parked at the edge of a dried-up oat field in...

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The Red Cap’s Hollow

The summer I turned four, my mother left me with my Aunt Ruth while she took the night shift at the cannery. Our house sat on the edge of a...

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The Lodger in the Linen Closet

The summer I turned nineteen, my grandmother’s sprawling Victorian bed-and-breakfast in the fog-choked hills of northern Vermont became my prison. My mother, a woman who found relaxation in meticulous planning,...

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The Clockwork Finch

I’ve never claimed to be sensitive to the unseen. No cold chills, no prickling at the back of my neck, no sudden knowledge of who was on the other end...

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The Lantern in the Cotton Field

The summer I turned nine, my family moved to a rented farmhouse on the edge of a town called Hollow Creek, nestled deep in the Mississippi Delta. It was a...

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The Gantry’s Weight

I’ve spent thirty years in emergency response, and I’ve learned that the job leaves marks you can’t see. I’ve pulled people from wrecks, held hands as they slipped away, and...

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