Ghost stories from Idaho

The Pallet Chime

The summer I turned fifteen, we traded our split-level for a two-story farmhouse at the edge of Maple Hollow, where the fields went fallow and the forest pressed close. I...

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The Lantern Man

After finishing high school, I landed a job at a small rural hospice called Stillwater House to save up for college. I had just gotten my CNA certification, and they...

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The Lantern in the Hall

I was eight, not seven, and it wasn’t my brother’s room but my younger sister’s. We lived in a two-story farmhouse that sat alone in the middle of a hundred...

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The Mannequin’s Flicker

For six years, I’ve worked the graveyard shift at the Cascade Falls Mall, a tired, two-story relic from the ’80s that smells of stale popcorn and old carpet. For the...

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The Filament Room

After my grandmother passed, I inherited her old house on the edge of the salt flats. The place had been in our family for generations, but I’d only visited as...

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The Painted Chain

I worked at Little Sprouts, a gleaming new day care perched on the edge of Candlewood, a town that pretended it wasn’t built on a reclaimed mining site. The building...

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The Lantern Keeper

My grandmother used to say that the house on Crow’s Perch Lane had a memory of its own. We moved there when I was just a boy, not much older...

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The Cold Collector

The summer that swallowed our town was the hottest on record, a wet blanket of heat that pressed down on everything. My old window unit, a beast that had roared...

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The Frosted Orchard

Ever since I could remember, I’d been drawn to forgotten places. My mother used to call me a little archaeologist, always poking around the overgrown lots and derelict barns that...

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The Warm Room’s Cold Bite

Last October, during a dreary Tuesday morning, I sat in my environmental science class, which was held in a temporary modular unit at the back of the school. The unit...

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The Pale Visitor at the Blueberry Farm

My family moved to a remote blueberry farm in the damp, misty hills of the Pacific Northwest. The house was a sagging Victorian remnant, wrapped in creeping vines and surrounded...

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The Ceiling Walker

I had been renting the old farmhouse on Cedar Hollow Road for nearly three years, ever since my divorce, when the first strange thing happened. It wasn’t a ghost, not...

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The Cement Room

When I was eight, my family moved into a sprawling ranch house in the high desert of New Mexico. The house was a relic of the 1970s, with shag carpeting...

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The Crate in the Crawl Space

My sister Mira was the first to see it. She claimed it was a small, dark thing, all sharp angles and too-long limbs, that skittered across the floor of her...

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The Radio at the End of the Hall

The year I turned twelve, my mother married a man named Carl, and we moved into his late mother’s house—a sprawling Victorian at the edge of a town that seemed...

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The Hollow Oak

The last place I wanted to be on a Friday night was a cemetery, but Jenna had been insistent. She had this new EMF reader that she swore was calibrated...

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The Static Between Channels

Three months after the relapse, I still couldn’t sleep without the fan on. It wasn’t the noise that comforted me—it was the way the white noise drowned out the internal...

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Murder House

I used to live in a small one level unit apartment in 1991. I didn’t have a problem with any of my neighbors except this one 20-something guy who I’d...

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The Silent Frequency

In the autumn of 2009, I was six months pregnant with my first child. My mother had passed away the previous winter, and I was renting a small apartment above...

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The Concrete Lullaby

I’ve been on edge for three days now, but it wasn’t until last night that I had to accept something was truly wrong. The feeling started with a news item...

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The Cinder Garden

I never thought I’d speak of it, but the weight of it has grown too heavy. It happened two autumns ago, in the town of Millbrook, where I lived in...

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The Unwelcome Playmate

It was a crisp October evening in 2019 when my mother, Elaine, and I were driving through the winding roads of the Shenandoah Valley. The leaves had turned to fiery...

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The Night the Lightbulb Flickered

When I was five, my family lived in a crooked house on a dead-end street, where the trees grew so thick they swallowed the moon. My bedroom was at the...

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The Hollow Algorithm

March 15th started like any other day in the cramped, dusty office of the Craigslist-rented warehouse in the industrial outskirts of Saskatoon. I was a data entry clerk for a...

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