Ghost stories from Indiana

The Salt and the Stairs

Ellen first noticed the weight in the air three weeks after moving into the old farmhouse. It was 1989, and the house had stood for a hundred and thirty years...

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The Basement Games

When I was four, my father took our golden retriever, Gus, for a walk along the old railroad tracks that bordered our town. It was a crisp autumn evening, and...

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The Red Dust of Ashford Hall

The demolition announcement hit the small campus like a sledgehammer. Ashford Hall, with its faded bricks and drafty corridors, was to be torn down within the year to make way...

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The Hollow Hum of the Kiln

We moved from the flatlands of Florida to the dusty outskirts of Winslow, Arizona, seeking a fresh start near my mother’s aging parents. The place we bought was a sprawling,...

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The Hollow Room Above

I was sixteen, that summer my mother shipped me off to my father’s house in the dusty foothills of New Mexico. She called it a ‘visitation,’ but we both knew...

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The Static in the Walls

I was nine when we moved into the old farmhouse on the outskirts of Cinder Hollow, a town that seemed to be perpetually gray, as if the sun had forgotten...

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The Static Between Walls

In the autumn of 2013, I was seventeen, living in a sprawling, drafty Victorian in the outskirts of a small Michigan town. The house had been in my stepfather’s family...

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The Stone in the Wall

When Marisol first moved into the old farmhouse, she was thrilled by the idea of owning a piece of history. The house had been empty for years, its walls thick...

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The Anechoic Chapel

My cousin Derek had always been drawn to the strange and the unexplained, but he was no ghost hunter, just a guy with a cheap EMF meter and too much...

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The Rotting Geometry

It started with a rusted gate, half-swallowed by blackberry brambles, in a forgotten corner of the Tennessee hills. My cousin Janie and I were mapping old farmsteads for a local...

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The Tattered Hare

Every Saturday, my father and I would explore the dusty corners of secondhand shops, hunting for relics that whispered of lives once lived. Our ritual was simple: a shared cup...

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The Murmur of the Oil Can

The garage had always been a place of quiet order, a haven of tools and half-finished projects. But last Wednesday, as I slid my work bag into the back of...

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The Dust on the Windowsill

I remember the summer of 1987, when the heat pressed down like a weight and the cicadas sang their endless dirge. That was the year I turned nine, and the...

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The Hummingbird’s Keepsake

Our house in Mirewood sat on a knoll overlooking a peat bog, a rambling Victorian built in 1887 by a man who installed a copper weathervane shaped like a hummingbird....

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The Compass of Bone

The day we moved into my grandfather’s house, the smell of old wood and dust settled around us like a shroud. My wife, Elena, and her younger sister, Marguerite, stood...

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The Man Who Hung in the Hall

I’ve always had a strange sensitivity to the unseen—call it a family gift, or a curse, depending on the night. My grandmother could read tea leaves, and my mother once...

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The Gravel in the Gears

The old textile mill on the edge of Meridian had been converted into artist lofts, and Nell had snagged the top-floor corner unit for a steal. The rent was impossibly...

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The Bellwether’s Mark

I’ve always been able to see them, the flickering remnants of people. Not faces, usually—just a shape, a suggestion of a person, a whisper of movement at the edge of...

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The Yellowed Photograph

I’m twenty-five now, and I live in a small apartment in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, but the things that happened to me when I was young still cling to me like spiderwebs...

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The Weight of a Stranger

I remember it so vividly, even though it was only a few months ago. My life had collapsed like a cheap tent in a storm. My partner of five years...

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The Shelf Above the Fan

The dormitory at Ashworth University was a brutalist concrete block, its corridors a maze of identical doors. My roommate, Marcus, and I drew the short straws and got room 314,...

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The Cinder Man

My grandmother Leona was born in 1892 in the dusty farming town of Dry Springs, Nevada, where the only thing more plentiful than sagebrush was secrets. Her mother, Ruth, was...

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The Persistent Sleeper

When I was thirteen, I spent most of my summer in the basement of our split-level house, hunched over a hand-me-down laptop playing flash games on a site called SpeckleQuest....

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The Red Unit

The day we moved into Unit 12, I told myself the cemetery across the street was a good omen. It meant quiet neighbors, a peaceful end to the cul-de-sac, and...

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