Ghost stories from Indiana

The Morning Line

The morning sun spilled over the ridge line like honey, catching the dew on the wild grass and turning the entire meadow into a field of scattered diamonds. I had...

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The Last Ferry

I never knew my great-uncle Elias well, but the way he left this world has stayed with me longer than any memory of his living self. He had been fading...

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The Sunken Orchard

When I was nine, my mother’s new husband, Gerald, bought a decaying estate on the outskirts of Blackwood, a town known for its dying apple orchards and a history steeped...

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The Lavender Room

In 2007, I was a seventeen-year-old boy named Caleb, lying on my bed in our cramped apartment above my mother’s bakery, listening to a burned mix CD on my Discman....

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The Leaf-Clasped Visitor

In the summer of 2007, my family relocated to a quiet coastal town named Greyhook, far from the bustling city we had known. The house we rented was an old...

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The Hunger in the Static

It had been nearly five months since Kira had left the compound, the place where silence was a virtue and the flesh was a sin. She had traded the hymns...

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The Spinning Wheel

My grandmother left me her house in the Cascade foothills, a rambling Victorian that had once been a stagecoach stop. The deed was in my name, and the keys felt...

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The Glass Operator’s Log

Marta Voss had spent the last decade of her life chasing signals. As a radio astronomer at the High Desert Radio Observatory, she lived by data, not by faith. She...

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The Brand of Salt and Rust

The town of Greyhollow sat in the crook of a mountain range like a dead fly in a spider’s web. The salt mines had long been the heart of the...

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The Last Lemonade

I was born in the middle of the worst drought our valley had seen in a century. The earth was cracked like a dry riverbed, and the air tasted of...

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The Static Garden

The house on Maplewood Lane had been quiet for months. Since the incident last spring, I had grown accustomed to the silence, convincing myself that whatever had been lurking in...

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The Depot’s Lullaby

When I was eight, my parents bought a tired, two-story house on the outskirts of Blackwood, a town so small it didn’t even merit a traffic light. The house had...

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The Grafting

I’ve been sleeping like a drowned man lately, sinking into black water and surfacing only to gasp. The nights used to be a refuge, a place where my mind could...

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The Cartographer’s Blight

I never expected to find a kindred spirit in an online forum dedicated to local history, but there she was: a woman named Elara who posted about the unsettling quiet...

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The Lantern of the Hollow

The first time I saw the lantern, I thought it was just a trick of the light, a leftover glimmer from the setting sun caught in the wild tangle of...

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The Hand on the Shoulder

The first time it happened, I blamed the bourbon. A long shift at the canning factory, the same metal-on-metal clang that followed me home, the cheap bottle I used to...

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The Cold Hollow

It was a sweltering July evening when my brother Marcus and I joined our granddad on one of his ‘night drives,’ as he called them. He’d done it for years,...

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The Bone Flute Tune

The summer I turned twelve, my family moved into a house that my great-aunt had left to my mother in her will. It was a sprawling, three-story Victorian in the...

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The Backyard of December

I was eight when we moved into the old carriage house behind the Cutler Funeral Home. It wasn’t a place for kids, not really. The building was three stories of...

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The Gravity of Station 7

After my family relocated to the remote outpost of Perdition Point, I thought the strange occurrences were just nerves from the move. The facility, a former research station perched on...

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The Man Who Never Answered

I was six when I first saw the man in our house on Cedar Lane, nestled in the damp woods outside of Ashford. It wasn’t a dramatic event—no flickering lights...

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The Cartographer’s Last Patient

My work has always been a quiet procession of small duties: adjusting pillows, measuring out pills, and learning the secret language of the old. I am not a nurse, not...

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The Painted Heron

I was twelve when my grandmother gave me the old camera. It was a heavy, brass-plated thing with a bellows that breathed in and out like a tired animal. She...

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The Last Quarter

The autumn term at Westbrook High had a way of swallowing the daylight by four in the afternoon. The parking lot was mostly empty when my friend Marcus and I...

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