Ghost stories from Idaho

The Reverse Lullaby

We had been living in the old farmhouse for eight years, ever since we inherited it from my husband’s aunt. The place was drafty and creaked with every gust of...

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The Last Tenant

The third-floor walk-up had always been quiet, the kind of quiet that settles into your bones after years of city noise. I had grown accustomed to the occasional creak of...

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The Granite Garden

In the autumn of 2021, I had transformed my front yard into a mosaic of colored stones and wildflowers—a stark contrast to the uniform lawns that lined our quiet cul-de-sac....

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The Settling Groans

Mara and I bought the house in late 2020, a mid-century split-level that had been flipped. The realtor touted the ‘new’ laminate flooring, but it was a botched job. Those...

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The Clock at 2:47

The move from the salt-laced air of Hilo to the pine-shadowed streets of Bend had been a shock to the system, but Lena and Marcus had adapted. Their new home...

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The Blue Album

The house on Maplethorpe Avenue had been a fixture in our town for as long as anyone could remember. It wasn’t the oldest or the grandest, but there was something...

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The Red Door on Ash Street

In the autumn of 2004, my husband Marcus and I were expecting our first child. We had been crashing at his mother’s cramped duplex for months, and the walls were...

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The Calendar of Hollow Hours

The farmhouse on Cinder Ridge Road had stood for nearly a century before we unpacked our first box. Its bones were good—solid oak beams, a wide wraparound porch, and a...

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The Rootbound Cross

In the autumn of 1994, I was seventeen, and the world had narrowed to a single, creaking house at the end of a gravel lane in the hill country of...

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The Salt Harvest

My partner Dana and I were weekend urban explorers, but our real love was the forgotten farmland that dotted the outskirts of our county. One Saturday, we pulled off a...

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The Boiler’s Breath

The heat in that top-floor flat was a living thing. It seeped from the radiators like a fever, fogging every window until the world outside dissolved into a milky blur....

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The Ceiling’s Warmth

In the sweltering August of 1974, my family moved to the outskirts of a small town in the Mojave Desert. My mother had inherited the house from a distant relative,...

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The Ceiling’s Arithmetic

The year after Elias vanished—lost to the sea, not dead, just gone, the officials said, though we both knew better—I moved to the old lighthouse keeper’s cottage on the northern...

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The Lantern in the Rain

I was nineteen when I moved to the town of Ashford to take care of my cousin’s son, Leo, while she worked the night shift at the hospital. The house...

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The Hollowing Hour

Six months ago, Dr. Elias Vance, a renowned botanist, purchased the dilapidated Glencairn Estate, nestled in the fog-choked highlands of western Scotland. He was a man of reason, a devout...

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The Unpacked Room

My sister-in-law, Dana, moved in with us after her husband, Carl, died. It was a suicide, and she found him. She didn’t talk about it, and we didn’t push. The...

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The Peculiar Weight of Silence

Mara had always prized the seclusion of her farmhouse, perched on a windswept hill overlooking miles of amber wheat. The nearest neighbor was a half-hour drive down a gravel road,...

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The Hollow Man in the Lantern’s Glow

It began two nights after I moved into the creaking Victorian house on the edge of Harlan Marsh. The house had been in my family for decades, abandoned after my...

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The Button in the Barn

My grandmother told me this story, and she swears it’s true. She’s ninety-eight now, and her memory is sharp as a tack. She had nine children, eight of whom are...

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The Mirror That Walked

I was nineteen, living in the attic of an old farmhouse my parents had bought cheap after the previous owner died. The room was a long, narrow space with sloped...

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The Staring Chimney

I was seven when the blanket first slid off my legs. It wasn’t a draft; it was a deliberate pull, like someone yanked the corner and let go. I yanked...

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The Cinder Charm

I grew up in a house that breathed with unease. It was a tall, narrow Victorian in the fog-choked outskirts of Astoria, not the vibrant city of Portland but a...

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The Sugar Thief of Bramble House

The Bramble House sat at the end of a gravel lane, its weathered porch sagging like an old dog’s back. We’d moved there for the quiet, for the woods that...

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The Hayloft Visitor

My first encounter with the unnatural happened when I was nine, in the autumn of 1987. We lived in a pre-fab modular home, the kind that always smelled of damp...

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