Ghost stories from Georgia

The Grain of the Door

I never believed in the kind of stories that get told around a dying campfire, the ones that make you glance over your shoulder at the rustling leaves. But then...

Read Story →

The Lavender Scent of Anger

The house on Maple Street had a smell that never quite left you. It wasn’t the usual must of old wood or the faint trace of mothballs; it was a...

Read Story →

The Man Who Was No One

I was seventeen when my father remarried and moved us to the old farmhouse outside of Hollow Creek. The place had been in his new wife’s family for generations, and...

Read Story →

The Sunken Line

We arrived at the old fish camp on the salt flats of the Lowcountry in the early afternoon, a break from our usual late-night arrivals. The place had been in...

Read Story →

The Stain on the Ceiling

I grew up in a house that never felt entirely still. It was a narrow, two-story Victorian on the edge of a town that had more trees than streetlights, a...

Read Story →

The Orchard Keeper’s Toll

My father and I drove up the gravel path to Old Man Harlow’s farm in the autumn of my sixteenth year. The place had been in our family for generations,...

Read Story →

The Faded Maroon Man

I moved to a quiet suburb outside of Tucson, Arizona, in the summer of 2012. My rental was a small adobe house at the edge of a development, with a...

Read Story →

The Lantern Man

The first time I saw it, I was seven, three years before I learned to call it a trick of the light. We lived in a house on the edge...

Read Story →

The Constant Visitor

Ten years ago, I signed a lease for a solitary cabin tucked into the folds of the Blue Ridge foothills, forty acres of whispering pines and rocky soil that felt...

Read Story →

The Occupied House

The moment we pulled into the driveway of the old Sutter place, I knew we had found something special. The rent was a steal at five hundred and seventy-five dollars...

Read Story →

The Empty Room’s Tenant

When I first moved into the old farmhouse on Gable Road, I thought the creaks and groans were just the house settling. But after the first week, I started hearing...

Read Story →

The Static Between Us

The cardboard boxes were stacked like tombstones in the cramped living room of my new apartment, a third-floor walk-up in a decrepit building that smelled of old pipe tobacco and...

Read Story →

The Weight of Stillness

The first time I noticed it, I thought it was the house settling. Old Victoriana on the edge of the marsh, groaning under its own weight. But the sound was...

Read Story →

The Fifth Stair

The old farmhouse on Cedar Lane had a peculiar quirk: the fifth stair from the top always creaked, no matter how gently you stepped. I remember that sound like a...

Read Story →

The Man with the Wrong Face

The house at 14 Juniper Lane had never felt like ours. Built in the late seventies by a reclusive architect who vanished before the paint dried, it was a sprawling,...

Read Story →

The Static Covenant

The rusted trailer sat at the edge of the Crayfield salt flats, a place where the ground shimmered with false water and the air tasted of minerals and decay. I...

Read Story →

The Static Between Frequencies

My roommate, Dana, and I considered ourselves rationalists in the purest sense. We were both graduate students in physics at the university, and our apartment was a testament to our...

Read Story →

The Weave in the Static

For weeks, the static in my bedroom radio had been a constant companion, a soft hiss that filled the silence of my sleepless nights. I’d bought the old AM/FM unit...

Read Story →

The Water Stain

When my roommate, Dana, and I found the listing for a two-bedroom fixer-upper on the edge of the industrial district, we were thrilled. The rent was a steal, and the...

Read Story →

The Static Garden

The first time I saw them, I was weeding the dill patch behind the greenhouse. It was late August, and the heat had turned the air to syrup, but these...

Read Story →

The Crumbs in the Mattress

The summer I turned sixteen, I went to stay with my aunt and uncle in the dusty foothills of the Ozarks. My cousin, Milo, had just turned twelve, and I...

Read Story →

The Tattered Veil

It was the summer of 2023, in the heart of rural Kansas, where the wheat fields stretched like a golden ocean and the heat shimmered off the asphalt. I was...

Read Story →

The Porcelain Throat

The house on Maple Street had never felt like home, not really. It was a modest two-bedroom bungalow, the kind with a slightly crooked porch and windows that gathered condensation...

Read Story →

The Pine Scent

The first time I noticed it, I was nine, sitting on the cracked linoleum floor of our rented duplex, watching my baby brother crawl toward the kitchen. Mom was at...

Read Story →