Ghost stories from Indiana

The Faces in the Foundation

Our house wasn’t a house when we moved in; it was a skeleton of brick and timber, a half-finished project abandoned by a contractor who’d vanished with my father’s savings....

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The Mirror in the Root Cellar

It started on a Tuesday, the kind of humid day that makes the air feel like a wet blanket. I was helping my aunt, Clara, inventory the antique shop she’d...

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The Red Triangle Grin

My first year at Meridian State University, I lived in an old dormitory they called Thorne Hall. The building had a reputation for being drafty and strange, but I figured...

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The Last Ember

My mother bought the old Harbinger Seed & Supply building about fourteen months ago. It’s a monstrous brick structure, four stories if you count the basement and the attic, with...

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The Last Broadcast

The day the television died was the day I learned that silence has a voice. My family and I were heading out for the weekly market run, and I was...

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The Hollow Creek House

In the autumn of my eleventh year, my father and I moved to a rented house on the outskirts of a small town in western Massachusetts, not far from the...

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The Salt Marsh Passenger

October 31, 1996, I was working the night shift for the Port Isabel Police Department, patrolling the lonely stretch of Old Stiltsville Road that ran along the edge of the...

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The Hollow Fiddler

I moved from the flat sprawl of Lafayette, Indiana, to a narrow valley in the Ozarks, where the hills fold in on themselves like a closed fist. The nearest town,...

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The Glass Eye

Maya had always been drawn to the eerie, the unexplained. Her best friend, Cora, shared her obsession, so when Cora received a vintage spirit board for her sixteenth birthday, Maya...

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The Sewing Room Door

I was never one to fear the dead. In fact, I found comfort in the whispers of the Ouija board, the way the planchette glided under my fingertips as if...

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The Lamp Flicker

My sister Lena and I had been staying at our uncle’s old farmhouse for the summer. It was a sprawling, creaky place with rooms that seemed to remember every secret...

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The Unseen Guest

It started with a noise, a soft thud from the attic, like a book falling from a shelf. My brother, Danny, was in his room playing an old console game,...

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The Last Tug

My name is Elena, and seven years have passed since my younger brother, Mateo, died. He was thirty-two, and a sudden aneurysm took him in the middle of the night....

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The Cold That Climbed

On the evening of my twenty-sixth birthday, I was recounting my history of strange occurrences to a circle of friends over cheap wine and dim lamplight. We had gathered in...

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The Palette’s Revenge

Five years ago, when my neighbor, Mrs. Gable, offered to watch my twins while I worked the late shift at the cannery, I thought it was a godsend. She was...

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The Blue Door of Meridian House

When my partner and I inherited Meridian House from an eccentric aunt we barely knew, we thought we were getting a fixer-upper with character. The place had been closed up...

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The Standing Shape

I first noticed it in the autumn of the year the mill shut down, when the whole town of Grey Hollow took on a brittle, waiting quality. I was staying...

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The Hungry Snow

When I was seven, we lived in a crumbling farmhouse at the edge of the Bitterroot Valley, Montana, where the winters came down from the mountains like a white shroud....

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The Last Polaroid

Ever since I was a kid, I had an imaginary friend. I called him Mr. Grimsby, though I don’t remember why. He was tall, wore a gray overcoat, and had...

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The Caved-in Staircase

My name is Marcus, and what I’m about to tell you happened in the autumn of 1994, in the town of Millbrook, Ohio. I was staying with my aunt and...

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The Last Tenant of Ashfall Flats

I never believed in the creaking of old pipes or the draft that rattled windows in abandoned buildings. As a building inspector, I’d seen too many decaying structures to count,...

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The Hollow of Bed 14

The motel stood at the edge of a dying town, its neon sign sputtering the name ‘The Pines’ in burnt-out letters. My partner, Lena, and I had booked the last...

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The Color of the Room

In 2012, I signed the papers for a dilapidated bungalow on the outskirts of a small town in upstate New York. The house had a sad history, many owners, each...

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The Settling Shelf

I moved into the old Harbinger Arms in the fall, drawn by the cheap rent and the high ceilings. The building had been a furniture warehouse in the 1920s, then...

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