Ghost stories from Georgia

The Last Goodnight

In the summer of 2008, in the sleepy town of Millbrook, a legend persisted about a stretch of road known as the Old Mill Highway. The locals whispered of a...

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The Pale Intruder

It was a week ago when I first noticed the light. I had just finished posting a status update on my social media page, the glow of the screen illuminating...

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The Cellar’s Ledger

In the late summer of 2018, I was transferred to the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, a sprawling, sun-bleached installation that felt more like a ghost town than a military...

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The Glass Case Rattler

The summer I turned seventeen, my family moved to a creaking farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, Iowa. The nearest neighbor was a half-mile down a gravel road, and the...

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The Salt Wound

The farmhouse at the edge of the Morrow wetland had been in our family for three generations, and when my brother Liam, his wife Tessa, and I moved in to...

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The Pencil Marks

I remember the spring of my ninth year, when the world still felt wide and open, and the woods behind our subdivision were a kingdom of endless possibility. My friend...

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The Pale Child of Pemberton Lane

The summer I turned thirteen, my family moved to the outskirts of a town called Pemberton, a place where the trees grew thick and the houses were spaced so far...

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The Watchers in the Hall

I’ve called the old farmhouse on Cedar Hollow Road home for nearly twenty-five years, ever since my parents brought me here as a child. The place creaks and moans like...

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The Lantern in the Static

The year was 2005, and we lived in a rented house on Ferndale Lane, a dead-end street where the streetlights flickered like dying fireflies. My daughter, Lily, was four. She...

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The Lace-Boned Visitor

My house on Bracken Lane, near the old mill, had a peculiar energy. It wasn’t the kind that made the hair on your arms stand up, but the kind that...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

It was the summer I turned thirteen, and the heat lay over our town like a wet wool blanket. My parents, both doctors, were working endless shifts at the county...

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The Unopened Door

Two autumns ago, I was sixteen and my girlfriend, Mara, was fifteen. She lived a few streets over in the same tired suburb, and my family’s house—a drafty Victorian with...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

My grandfather, Elias, was not a man given to fear. He had weathered wars, famines, and the quiet despair of a failed harvest. Yet, in his final years, a dread...

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The Lantern Man

It was the autumn of 2002, and I was nineteen, visiting my cousin Darla in the small town of Pemberton Falls. Darla had a friend named Maude, a girl with...

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The Grave Borrower

When I was two, my mother packed us into the station wagon and drove cross-country to visit her estranged brother, Uncle Milo, in the dusty town of Red Hollow. I’ve...

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The Clock at the End of the Hall

The night my father died, the house on Cedar Lane seemed to hold its breath. I was fifteen, my brother Marcus was thirteen, and our little sister Lily was only...

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The Salt Lines

The first time I noticed the salt lines was on a Tuesday, three weeks after we moved into Uncle Harold’s house on the edge of the salt flats. Aunt Mabel...

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Tapping Sounds

I am 57 and retired, living in the south GA town of Douglas. For months, I have heard tapping coming from my closet. Being retired, and sometimes having back pain,...

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The Rag Doll in the Cellar

I never put much stock in hauntings, not until the summer of 2019, when I was house-sitting for my aunt in the sleepy town of Waverly, Nebraska. The house was...

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The Basement of the Yellow House

I’d always considered myself a connoisseur of fear. Growing up, I devoured every horror novel and film I could find, convinced that I was immune to the cheap thrills that...

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The Lantern in the Crawlspace

I was maybe six when I first saw the thing under the house. We lived in a rusted farmhouse on the edge of a dead cornfield in eastern Nebraska, where...

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The Rusted Gate of Miller’s Field

My grandmother, Elena, used to say that the land around our town remembered everything, even the things everyone else tried to forget. She had eyes that saw too much and...

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The Fourth Month Light

The apartment on Maple Street had no stairs, which was the only reason I chose it. Ryan, my firstborn, had developed a talent for scaling furniture like a tiny mountain...

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The Lantern Man in the Orchard

The summer I turned thirteen, my father and I missed my great-aunt Margaret’s wedding to a man none of us knew well. She had met him in a grief support...

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