Ghost stories from Indiana

The Static Between Stations

Maya was twelve, but she’d learned to keep secrets the way other kids learned multiplication tables—by rote, with a silent fear of being called to the board. Her secret was...

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The Salt and the Iron

I never believed in the old stories about the mill house, not until my cousin Marta came to stay. The place had been in our family for generations, built by...

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The Last Bedtime Story

I’ve been a companion for over a decade, and I’ve learned to read the subtle signs of a house in decline. But when I pulled up to the sprawling Victorian...

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The Hollow Sign

The old farmhouse on Larkspur Lane had never felt like ours, not truly. We’d moved in three years ago, drawn by the cheap rent and the promise of space for...

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The Salt Line

The morning of the incident, I was in the upstairs bathroom of our old farmhouse, the one with the peeling floral wallpaper and the window that never quite closed. My...

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The Lanternkeeper’s Portrait

My daughter Mira and I have always had a fascination with the strange and unexplained. For the past year, we’ve devoured every paranormal documentary and ghost-hunting series on television. It...

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The Painted Over Door

The old farmhouse sat at the end of a gravel road, half-swallowed by weeds and weather. When my parents bought it in the summer of 1993, I was seven, small...

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The Third Visit

In the autumn of 2004, I was seventeen and had been seeing a girl named Lena from a small town in upstate New York. Her father, Carl, was a retired...

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The Ceiling’s White Bloom

The house on Maple Hollow Road was an inheritance from my grandmother, a Victorian relic with creaking bones and a basement that exhaled cold air. My room was the converted...

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The Empty Carton

I moved into the old farmhouse in the autumn of 2018, drawn by its sagging porch and the orchard that skeletonized into winter. The first oddity happened in the kitchen—a...

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The Unfinished Argument

Elara and her husband, Julian, were driving to the Marrow Hills Memorial Park to visit her younger sister, Mira, who had died two years ago at the age of 34....

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The Cupboard Game

My grandmother always said that old houses have a way of collecting things, and ours was no exception. The walls of the farmhouse on Cedar Lane had been soaking up...

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The Frost Caress

I enlisted straight out of high school, trading the dusty plains of Amarillo for a decade of barracks and rented rooms. In all that time, across a dozen states and...

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The Indelible Stain

The year I turned eleven, we moved into my great-uncle’s farmhouse, a sprawling, dilapidated structure that smelled of old wood and damp earth. My brother, Leo, and I were promised...

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The Suspended Sphere

I was twelve the summer my cousin Maya came to stay with us, the summer the air in our backyard turned thick and watchful. We were on the old trampoline,...

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The Resonance of the Unfinished

The day before my thirty-second birthday, I learned that Marcus had been murdered. The news came through a terse text from an old classmate, a name I hadn’t seen in...

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The Grain of the Table

When I was twelve, my family moved to a new town and I enrolled at St. Margaret’s, a small Catholic school where everyone seemed to know each other except me....

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The Eye of the Elm

The day I turned sixteen, my mother and I moved into the old farmhouse my grandfather had built with his own hands. It stood at the edge of a dying...

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The Painted Ledger

My wife, Elena, and I bought the old Hendricks place on the outskirts of Morrow County, a sagging Victorian that had been abandoned for nearly a decade. The first year...

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The Hollow Ground Directive

In the autumn of 2016, the town of Ashwood lay under a perpetual slate sky, its streets lined with old oaks that whispered secrets to the wind. My sister, Clara,...

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The Static in the Apples

My earliest clear memory is the smell of paint and the sound of my mother’s anklet jingling as she walked through the empty rooms of the house on Orchard Lane....

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The Tin Bird’s Last Migration

I was nine when I met Mr. Hemlock, though he wasn’t old enough to be a ‘Mr.’ to most kids. He lived three doors down in the same row of...

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The Bathroom Door

I was six when we moved into the yellow house on Cedar Lane, a fresh start my parents insisted, though all I could remember was the ache of leaving my...

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The Lullaby Static

Mara had always scoffed at her sister’s insistence on sleeping with the TV on—some fuzzy channel that played old cartoons and lullabies. It was silly, she thought, a childish comfort....

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