Ghost stories from Hawaii

The Cave-In at Makana Point

In the summer of 1987, I was a wiry twelve-year-old who could outrun most of the neighborhood boys and had a stubborn streak that my mother called ‘hard-headed.’ We lived...

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The Perfume of Static

In the autumn of 2007, I worked as an administrative clerk in the Municipal Archives of the old Meridian General Hospital, a sprawling brick complex that had been abandoned for...

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The Lanai’s Last Tenant

Milo had been working the graveyard shift at the cannery in Hilo for three weeks when sleep became a precious, stolen commodity. He’d crash on the worn floral couch in...

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The Flashing Light on Cypress Lane

It was the summer I turned eleven, and my family had just moved to the dusty outskirts of Fort Stockton, Texas, where the heat shimmered off the pavement like a...

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The Red-Eyed Myna

My husband Daniel and I had been living in the old plantation duplex on Maui for barely a year when we realized we weren’t the only ones hearing things at...

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The Salt-Worn Cross

My name is Jack, a former Marine, and I’m writing this down because I need someone to believe me. What happened on that remote Alaskan island wasn’t a dream, and...

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The Sliding Glass Wall

Twenty years have passed since we lived in the weathered duplex on the windward side of Oahu, where the salt air ate at everything and the jungle pressed close against...

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The Cinder Man

I had always prided myself on my rationality. As an engineer, I dealt in equations and empirical evidence; the supernatural was a fairy tale for the gullible. When I moved...

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The Rooftop Sign

The rain hadn’t stopped for three days, turning the gravel drive of the MacIntyre farm into a slick, muddy scar. We’d moved there for the quiet, for the space, but...

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The Last Keeper of the Pale Sands

My grandmother, or Tita as we called her on the island of Auroa, was the heart of our sprawling family. We numbered nearly sixty in the immediate circle, with hundreds...

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The Pale Visitor

The air in the Maui condo was thick with the scent of plumeria and salt, a perfume that usually promised rest. But at 3 AM, it felt cloying, almost suffocating....

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In the sweltering summer of 1987, in a cramped apartment complex in Wahiawa, Oahu, the Nakamura children—twelve-year-old Leilani, her ten-year-old brother Kanoa, and their eight-year-old cousin Miki—found a dusty Ouija...

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The Seep of Sorrowwood

I never thought much about the bed frame that arrived one Tuesday evening, wrapped in a tarp like a body. My friend had offered me a white wicker set—light, airy,...

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The Saltwater Visitor

Six years ago, when I was eleven, we were at my great-aunt’s cottage on a remote island off the coast of Maine. The cottage was old, with creaky floorboards and...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Ledger

The house on Lantern Way was a stately Victorian, its gingerbread trim peeling like sunburned skin, its wraparound porch sagging with the weight of a century. I’d moved there with...

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The Harp in the Attic

My name is Elara, and I grew up in a sprawling Victorian house in the rainy town of Blackwood, Oregon. The house was a maze of creaking floors and drafty...

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The Static Garden

The summer I turned thirty-one, I took a solo trip to the coastal village of Saltmead, a place known for its crumbling Victorian guesthouses and the relentless fog that rolled...

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The Giggling in the Backseat

It was three in the morning when I started my drive home from my friend’s place in the countryside. The road was a narrow, moonlit ribbon flanked by dense woods,...

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The Static Visitor

It began in late October, when the wind off the reservoir turned brittle and the first frost painted the reeds silver. I was living alone in a converted water tower...

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The Hollow in the Hill

When we moved to the town of Pinehaven, I was nine and my baby sister, Elsie, was barely a year old. Our house was perched on a slope, its back...

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The Lantern That Remembers

The first time I saw the lantern, I was seven years old, kneeling in the damp soil of my grandmother’s garden on the outskirts of Hilo. It wasn’t a real...

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The Saltwater Stains

The first time I saw the house, I thought it looked like a drowned man. It stood at the end of a cul-de-sac in the old section of the naval...

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The Keeper of the Veil

My grandmother, Aunty Lani, used to say that the veil between worlds is thin in Hawaii, especially at places where the old ones walked. I never thought much of it...

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The Koa Tree Watches

The valley of Pu’ukoa on the Big Island had always felt heavy, as if the air itself remembered the battles fought and the chiefs who had walked these slopes. My...

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