Ghost stories from Indiana

The Paper Boat Regatta

At four, I clung to my father’s hand in the sterile corridor of St. Jude’s, the smell of antiseptic burning my nostrils. Through the small window of room 412, I...

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The Humming Wire

It began when I was seventeen, in the autumn after my mother and grandmother had both slipped away, nine months apart, into the quiet that swallowed their final breaths. We...

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The Upright Stance

In my junior year of college, I shared a cramped apartment with a guy named Marcus. At first, it was just oddities: a spoon clattering to the floor from the...

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The Static in the Walls

In the summer of 1996, when I was four, we lived in a sun-scorched cluster of mobile homes on the edge of a dying desert town. My mother and her...

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The Frozen Room

My name is Clara, and I’m eighteen. I live in a small town in upstate New York, in a house that was built in 1967, just after the Great White...

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The Salt-Stained Threshold

My name is Elena Marsh, and I’ve always been drawn to the overlooked corners of the world. So when I inherited a decaying bait shop on the edge of the...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

My grandmother’s farm sat at the edge of the Thornwood, a place where the pines grew so thick they swallowed the daylight. I spent my summers there as a child,...

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The Borrower in the Walls

The steady drip of the bathroom faucet was the only sound in the small dorm room, a rhythmic metronome that marked the passage of time. Kenji had gotten used to...

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The Lamplight on Ash Lane

I was staying at my sister’s house on the edge of a small, dying town called Morrow’s Rest. The house was old, with creaking floors and windows that rattled in...

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The Taker of Vigils

The summer I turned thirty-four, I moved into my late grandmother’s farmhouse in the dusty heart of Kansas, hoping to escape the noise of the city. The house had been...

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The Puddle Room

In the autumn of 1982, Vera and her four-year-old son, Milo, moved into a dilapidated Victorian house on the outskirts of a small Midwestern town, after her divorce from Milo’s...

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The Breathing Fog

It was the tail end of July, and the heat had been suffocating for weeks. My friend Marcus, who had a knack for finding trouble, swore up and down that...

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The Crate in the Cellar

Ever since I was seven, the year my great-aunt Marigold passed, I’ve carried a constant, prickling awareness that unseen eyes are fixed on me. It’s not a fleeting unease that...

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The Salt Line and the Lake

I grew up in a town that forgot its name, or perhaps never had one to begin with. It sat on the edge of a salt lake that never froze,...

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The Clockmaker’s Apprentice

The workshop had always smelled of oil and brass, but after Grandfather Elias died, it reeked of neglect. I was thirteen when I found the letter, tucked behind the pendulum...

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The Devouring Mother

Ever since the old convent on Mill Road was deconsecrated and turned into a museum, I’d felt an odd pull toward it. I’m not religious, never have been, but there...

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The Frame Watcher

I first noticed it when I was seven, standing in the bathroom of our old house on Birch Lane. It was a smudge in the mirror, a darkness behind my...

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The Hungry Hollow

Eloise had just turned three, and we lived in a crooked little house at the edge of the Hungry Hollow, a deep, tangled forest that seemed to swallow light. I’d...

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The Knocker in the Wall

The old farmhouse on Hemlock Road had been a fixer-upper, but for Lena and her husband, it was a dream. They’d moved in with their three-year-old, Maya, just as the...

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The Hollow Knees of the Blue House

At sixteen, I was the sort of kid who laughed at ghost stories, who rolled his eyes at the creaks of old houses, chalking them up to wood settling or...

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The Weaver of Dust

The old farmhouse always felt like it was holding its breath. Alistair had inherited it from his great-uncle, a man who had lived alone for decades and whose only companions...

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The Window in the Wall

I was twelve when my grandmother, Elsie, moved into our house. She had been living alone for years, but after the diagnosis, my parents decided she needed care. The disease...

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The Thirst That Crawled

I was four when I learned that thirst could be a living thing. We lived on the fifth floor of the Meridian Towers, a block of concrete and rust that...

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The Unfinished Portrait of Eleanor Voss

In the autumn of 1987, my brother Marcus moved into a cramped two-bedroom bungalow on the edge of Grey Hollow, a town so small it barely made the map. He...

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