Ghost stories from Illinois

The Fossil Road

I grew up in a small house on the edge of a town that was slowly being swallowed by the desert. My stepfather, a quiet man named Arthur, worked as...

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The Shelf of Unfinished Things

In the autumn of 1994, the old house on Cedar Lane had just become ours. It was a sprawling Victorian that had seen better decades, its bones creaking with every...

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The Knocking in the Lower Berth

When I was nine, my older brother Caleb and I shared a cramped room at the top of our rickety Victorian house on Bramble Lane. We had a bunk bed...

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The Pantry Light

The farmhouse settled into its nightly creaks, a symphony of old timber and wind that I’d long grown accustomed to. My room, a converted attic space at the top of...

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The Blueprint of Dread

At seventeen, I had memorized every creak and shadow of our hundred-year-old farmhouse in rural Pennsylvania, a place my great-grandfather built with his own hands. When my parents decided to...

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The Keeper of the Orchard

The house was a crooked Victorian relic, wedged between a dying orchard and a creek that ran brown with iron. I’d bought it cheap, drawn by the silence—a silence so...

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The Pale Door in the Russet Room

The year I turned eleven, my parents sent me to stay with my aunt in the town of Millbrook for the summer. I didn’t know anyone my age, so I...

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The Gilded Stillness

Mara had been meditating for years, but the past two months had shifted into something stranger. It started with a sensation of her hands growing warm, then heavy, as if...

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The Cold Spot on Marrow Lane

I’m seventeen, and I’ve been a regular reader of this site for years. The stories here are usually about creepy dolls or haunted hospitals, and I’d always scroll through them...

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The Papered Window

The day we moved into the old farmhouse on Birch Lane, the air smelled of dry rot and forgotten Sundays. My wife, Elena, noticed it first—a faint, sweet odor like...

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The Static Between Reels

In the summer of 2013, I purchased a cheap digital camcorder from a pawn shop, mostly to film my younger sister’s birthday party. After the event, I forgot about the...

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The Lantern’s Debt

The town of Harlow’s Mill had a secret that it kept behind closed shutters and drawn blinds. Ever since the old mill burned down in ’09, the nights had a...

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The Porcelain Key

The rain had been drumming against the corrugated metal roof of my cabin since dusk, a relentless percussion that set my teeth on edge. It was a sound I usually...

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The Mulberry Veil

Eighteen years ago, I was thirty-one, living with my wife, Elena, in a converted carriage house on the outskirts of Duluth, Minnesota. The property had once belonged to a wealthy...

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The Photograph That Spoke

The night air clung to my skin like a damp shroud as I sat on the edge of my bed, the glow of my iPad painting pale shadows across the...

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The Half-Open Door

Our pet care business had never once given us a genuine scare. We’d watched over dozens of homes, from cluttered bungalows to sterile apartments, and the worst we’d ever encountered...

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The Lantern’s Bargain

In the cramped two-room flat above a shuttered laundromat, Lena and I had carved out a fragile peace. The city hummed below, indifferent and gray, but inside, the radiator clanked...

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The Depressed Side of the Bed

I’ve never been able to pinpoint when it started. My earliest clear memory is from the winter of sixth grade, but I suspect it began before that, in the hazy...

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The Flicker in the Sensor

I’ve never told anyone about the things I’ve seen in the basement of the Marlowe House. Not my wife, not my therapist, not even the paranormal forum I occasionally lurk...

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The Bone Gate

In the summer of my fifteenth year, my father took me to a fishing lodge in the pine barrens of northern Minnesota. He was there to meet an old army...

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The Kitchen Scales

My flat occupies the top floor of an old brick building that once served as a tannery in the early 1900s. The neighborhood is quiet now, but the bones of...

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The Bone Orchard Pool

The summer I turned eleven, my mother decided I needed to ‘get some sun and learn some responsibility.’ That was her way of saying she was tired of me moping...

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The Repeating Kitchen

I was crashing at my buddy’s place, a run-down ranch nestled in the scrubby hills of Arizona, not far from the border. A few of us from the unit had...

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The Cartographer of the Unlit Floor

My name is Elias, and for the past six months, I’ve lived in the Marrow Building, a brutalist concrete tower that rises from the edge of a forgotten industrial district....

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