Ghost stories from Illinois

The Saltwater Static

The summer I turned twelve, my family swapped the gray hum of Chicago’s suburbs for the salt-bleached heat of Palmetto Dunes, a gated resort town on the South Carolina coast....

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The Wormwood Gate

When I was six, my family moved into a house that seemed to breathe. It sat at the end of a gravel lane in the Oregon woods, where the trees...

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The Kiln Room

The house on Hemlock Lane was a hundred and three years old, a sagging Victorian with a brick foundation that sweated in the summer. My wife and I had moved...

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The Hollow Grove Ritual

I was nine when my stepmother, Clara, dragged me to the Pinewood County Fair’s medieval encampment. My father, a history buff, had joined the Society for Creative Anachronism, and Clara,...

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The Rook’s Cipher

The old house at 13 Wren Lane had a way of settling into your bones. Eli knew this the moment he stepped through the creaking front door, carrying one sleeping...

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The Arrival Through the Frost

It was the winter of my ninth year when I first became aware of the cold. Not the chill of the air, but the cold of an ending. I remember...

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The Faded Gazette

When I was twelve, my family moved into a creaky old house on the edge of a town that had seen better days. The house had been a local landmark,...

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The Unseen Stairway

Three years ago, I was house-sitting for my aunt and uncle while they were on a cruise, and my cousin was away at university. I was staying in their old...

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The Yearbook Index

When I was twelve, my mother and I were cleaning out the attic of our old farmhouse, a creaking relic from the 1880s that had been in our family for...

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The Polished Brass Key

In the autumn of 2005, my friend Dana and I picked up a house-cleaning gig for an elderly couple who lived on the outskirts of our small town. The house...

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The Empty Easel

I’m Mara, and this is the only time I’ve ever felt the world slip sideways, showing me something that shouldn’t exist. It happened years ago, at my friend Elowen’s house,...

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The Glass Marble Collector

On a rain-slicked August evening in 2007, I signed the lease for the Maplehurst Apartments, unit 3B. The building was a squat, soot-stained brick relic from the 1970s, wedged between...

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The Empty Apartment

I was eight when we lived in the Meridian Apartments, a sprawling complex of identical beige buildings that all looked the same from the outside. My sister Lena and I...

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The Scrabbling in the Root Cellar

It was late autumn, the kind of gray afternoon where the light dies before you’re ready, and I was alone in the farmhouse my grandparents had left to my parents....

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The Lantern in the Hall

The house on Pemberton Street had a peculiar smell, a mix of old wood and dust, and my mother always kept a small lamp burning on the hallway table ‘to...

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The Blind Weaver’s Bargain

My name is Elias Thorne, and I’ve always been able to see things others can’t. It started when I was seven, with dreams that weren’t dreams—visions of my older brother,...

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The Mockingbird’s Lullaby

I never told anyone about the summer of 1987, not even my husband. I’m a structural engineer, a woman who deals in load-bearing calculations and the tensile strength of steel....

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The Lantern Wakes

It was a Tuesday when the red-eye from Reykjavik finally touched down, three hours late. My name is Daniel, and I had been gone for a week on a logistical...

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The Cinder-Box Sessions

In the autumn of 1988, I was twenty years old, living in a sprawling, drafty Victorian house that had been chopped into apartments. My roommate, Danny, and I had the...

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The Ceiling’s Cradle

The first time it happened, I was eleven, tucked into the narrow bottom bunk of the bed I shared with my brother, Leo. He was away at a Scout camp...

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The Sway of the Hanging Bulbs

My grandmother’s farmhouse sat on a lonely stretch of prairie, where the wind never stopped its low, mournful song. The basement was a dank, stone cavern, lit by a single,...

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The Tinsel Chime

The first time I heard it, I thought it was the wind rattling the loose gutter above the porch. December in Hollow Creek is a wet, bitter affair, and the...

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The Lantern Keeper

My earliest memory of the unnatural is tied to a summer storm that never broke. I was six, staying at my grandmother’s farmhouse in the hills, where the horizon always...

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The Rusted Lullaby

At six years old, I was convinced I would die on the gurney rolling me through the sterile tunnels of St. Aldwyn’s Memorial. The hospital was a maze of pale...

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