Ghost stories from Indiana

The Persimmon Grove

In the summer of 1978, my family settled into a ranch-style house in a new development called Creekside Estates. The land had once been an orchard, and the stumps of...

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The Cardboard Box

The summer I turned twelve, my dad and stepmom decided I was old enough for real chores. We lived in a brand-new subdivision called Maple Hollow, where every lawn was...

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The Staple in the Floor

It began with a cardboard box of my belongings and a handshake that felt more like a lifeline. After my own run of bad luck, I’d landed on my feet...

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The Vanishing at Crowswood Manor

My name is Elias Thorne, and I never believed in ghosts. I was a skeptic, a man of science, which made it all the more ironic that I found myself...

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The Garden of Rusted Gates

The summer I turned twelve, my parents sent me to stay with my grandmother in the foothills of the Appalachians. Her house sat at the end of a gravel road,...

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The Juniper Frame

The house on Maple Row was a stubborn relic of the 1950s, its pale yellow siding peeling like sunburnt skin. It had been my grandmother’s, passed to my aunt, then...

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The Pale Visitor

My earliest memory is a hospital ceiling, white and pockmarked like a diseased lung. I was three, maybe four, with tubes in my ears and a constant, dull thrum of...

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The Permutation of the Living

I never believed in ghosts, not really. But when I inherited my great-aunt’s house in the dusty foothills of the Sutter Buttes, I felt a pull—an inexplicable sense that this...

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The Weft of Morning

The first time I saw her, I was eight, standing at the kitchen window of our old farmhouse. She was a shimmer of pale blue against the cornfield, a woman...

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The Clockwork Foyer

In the rust-colored autumn of 2017, Danny Rourke took his first job at the Aldercroft, a sprawling Victorian relic that had once been a grand opera house. The town of...

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The Pale Cartographer

It was a humid Tuesday night in late July, and the air in the cul-de-sac hung thick with the smell of cut grass and ozone. My parents were both on...

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The Bench by the Willows

My name is Elias, and I was thirteen when it happened. We lived on the edge of a town that didn’t even have a stoplight, in a house that had...

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The Concrete Hum

My earliest memory is the hum. Not a sound you hear, but a pressure in the bones, a vibration behind the eyes. It came from the house my parents bought...

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The Tenant in the Wall

The old farmhouse outside of Carbondale had always been a project for my father, a man who found peace in restoring what time had worn away. He’d bought it for...

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The Unlocked Pantry

When I agreed to house-sit for Mrs. Albright, I expected a few weeks of peace and quiet, not a descent into something cold and watchful. Mrs. Albright, who lived two...

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The Offering Pit

The dust of the broken foundation settled into my lungs as I shoveled the last of the crumbling mortar into the wheelbarrow. The old barn had been dead for decades,...

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The Salt Hollow Incident

The house on Parchman Street had stood for a hundred and fifty-seven years, its bones creaking with every shift of the wind. Theodore had bought it for a song, lured...

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The Thumping in the Root Cellar

When I was nine, my family spent a weekend at my aunt’s farmhouse in the Nebraska flatlands. The house was over a hundred years old, with creaking floorboards and a...

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The Hollow Room

The first week in the cedar house felt like a promise. We had left the city, left the noise and the gray, for a place where the air smelled like...

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The Cassette Rewind

In the autumn of 1998, my then-wife Elena and I moved into a refurbished farmhouse on the outskirts of a small town called Millbrook. It was a fixer-upper, with creaking...

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The Tall Man in the Static

The day the sun forgot our street, I knew things had shifted. My sister Clara and I had just turned eight, and we’d moved to a gray, two-story house at...

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The Cradle Exchange

In the early hours of a rain-soaked morning, in a small town settled between the cornfields of Illinois, a young mother named Clara was trying to catch up on sleep...

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The Night the Circuitry Woke

I was a third-generation steelworker, and damn proud of the grime under my nails. But in the autumn of 2019, the century-old mill in Gary, Indiana, went silent, and the...

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The Chime at 5:17

The old farmhouse on Mabel’s Ridge had been in our family for four generations, but that didn’t make it any less alien to me. I’d moved there with my parents...

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