Ghost stories from Illinois

The Glass Bloom

The apartment on Meridian Street had always been a place of small noises—the radiators ticking like arthritic knuckles, the floorboards sighing underfoot, the faint hum of the city beyond the...

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The Grove of Hanging Moss

I’ve lived in the shadow of Harlow’s Mill all my life, but it wasn’t until my sixteenth summer that the place truly seeped into my bones. Our farmhouse is a...

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The Unyielding Static

The autumn of 1994 marked the worst of it. For three years, the house on Cedar Lane had been a place of uneasy nights and hushed conversations. My family—my mother,...

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The Summer Before the Fourth

I’ve worked at the Calder House for nearly two decades, a sprawling Victorian that once served as a summer retreat for the wealthy. Now it’s a care facility for the...

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The Hollow Between the Walls

At five, I didn’t know fear. Not the real, bone-deep kind that coils in your stomach and whispers your name in the dark. I was a child of the prairie,...

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The Lantern’s Vigil

Four years have passed since I fled my family’s home on Cedar Lane, but the memory of the black walnut tree pressing against my bedroom window still haunts me. I...

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The Hollow Under the Hawthorns

In the autumn of 1994, my daughter, Elena, was in the eighth grade at a small school in the rolling hills of southern Indiana. Every weekday, I drove her to...

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The Chalk Lemur

The Chalk Lemur My name is Elara, and I grew up in the attic of a bookbinder’s shop, surrounded by the smell of leather and old paper. My father was...

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The Night the Oak Remembered

The house I grew up in stood at the edge of a dying town in the Pacific Northwest, where the rain never really stopped and the moss grew thick on...

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The Plastered Door

At 4 AM, the house on Cinder Lane was a frozen cathedral of creaks and sighs. I lived on the top floor, a converted loft with sloped ceilings and a...

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The Turquoise Cap

At the Golden Pines Assisted Living Facility, tucked away in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I spent my mornings scrubbing linoleum and polishing handrails. The building was a...

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The Slender Visitor

The first time I heard about the slender visitor was during the autumn of 2011, in the quiet halls of Cedar Hills Convalescent Home. I was a night aide then,...

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The Harbinger of Hollow Creek

The first frost came early that year, settling over Hollow Creek like a shroud. I should have taken it as a sign, but grief has a way of dulling the...

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The Breakfast Ritual

In the autumn of 2009, Maplewood Manor, a sprawling Victorian-era building converted into a nursing home, housed a new resident named Agnes. She arrived with trembling hands and a mind...

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The Bone Hour at the Harvest Home

The Harvest Home was never a cheerful place, even on the brightest days. It squatted at the edge of a dusty town in the Texas Panhandle, its red brick faded...

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The Salt Air Reunion

In the autumn of 2008, I was dating Mara, a marine biologist who had just moved to the small coastal town of Pescadero to study the tide pools. We were...

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The Carousel of Glass

At sixteen, I had my first real job at the oddly named Pleasure Pier, a cavernous indoor amusement park that had once been the pride of our small lakeside town....

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The Calcium Halo

Marta had been convalescing for weeks, her body a battlefield of inexplicable aches and a persistent, low-grade fever that the doctors called ‘idiopathic,’ which she translated as ‘we don’t know.’...

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The Backward Walker

I was seven that autumn, the year the canal froze early and the reeds turned to brittle spears along the water’s edge. My grandfather, a stooped man with a voice...

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The Pockmarked Window

Mara had lived in the old farmhouse her whole life, surrounded by fields of tall grass that whispered secrets in the wind. Her brother, Ethan, two years younger, shared her...

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The Hollow in the Static

Mara had always lived with a peculiar affliction, one she could never fully explain to anyone without inviting ridicule. It wasn’t that she heard things in her head; no, those...

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The Garden’s Lament

It began five months ago, on the edge of a small town in the Pacific Northwest, where the forest pressed close against the back of my property. I lived alone...

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The Blue Static

The first thing I noticed was the dog. Mowgli, my shepherd mix, had been sulking at the bedroom door since I got home from the night shift at the data...

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The Phantom Exchange

In the autumn of 1983, I moved into the top floor of a converted Victorian mansion that had been split into two flats. The lower flat had been vacant for...

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