Ghost stories from Iowa

The Hollow Between the Pines

In the autumn of 1987, my family packed our belongings into a rusted Chevy and drove along the winding roads of the Oregon coast, until we reached a house that...

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The Weave of Static

I had been staring at the ceiling for what felt like hours, the digital clock on the nightstand glowing 1:03 AM in accusatory red. My mind was a churning river...

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The Static Between Stations

The Emerson House had been a bargain, and that was its first lie. It sat at the end of a dead-end road in Maple Hollow, a town so quiet that...

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The Last Clear Day

On a Tuesday in late October, the sky over our small town of Stillwater was so blue it hurt to look at. I was twelve, and my mother and I...

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The Brass Key

Elena had never been one for superstition. At twenty-five, she prided herself on a rational mind, a steady job, and a cozy, if slightly musty, apartment on the top floor...

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The Static Between Heartbeats

Maya had always considered herself pragmatic. Ghost stories were for people who left their windows open at night, who watched too many horror films. She was a nursing student, and...

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The Hollow Promise

It was the summer of 1988, and I’d brought my daughter, Leena, to visit my mother in the dusty town of Kettle Springs, Nebraska. The air was thick with heat...

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The Bone Bridge

The summer of ’87 was sticky and hot, and my wife Lila and I had fled the city for my mother’s farmhouse in the hills of West Virginia. I’d promised...

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The Journey to Forgotten Places

I took Ava to visit my aunt one autumn weekend. I can’t recall the exact year, but it was sometime in the late ’80s. My aunt lived in a small...

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The Bloom of the Amber Stain

The air in the dilapidated barn hung thick and cloying, a testament to years of undisturbed decay. Amelia tightened her grip on her flashlight, its beam cutting a weak swathe...

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Poltergeist at my Sisters

This story isn’t about me. This happened to my sister, Stef and her husband, Pat, and is still going on. I am terribly afraid for both of them. My brother-in-law...

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The Basement Clock

When I turned twenty, I thought I’d left the oddities behind in my dad’s old farmhouse in rural Nebraska. But life had other plans, and now I’m living in a...

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The Hollow Step

The old house on Maple Hollow Lane was a monster of peeling paint and sagging porches, its windows like vacant eyes. My brother Evan and I, Kate, were twelve and...

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The Peek-a-Boo Child

After the fire that took our last place, my partner and I moved into a cramped third-floor walk-up on the eastern edge of Meridian. The building smelled of boiled cabbage...

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The Clockwork Cane

I was nestled in the corner of my attic bedroom, sketching the gnarled oak outside my window, when the first thump resonated through the ceiling. It was a hollow, deliberate...

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The Room That Knew

When Clara and I signed the lease for the old farmhouse on Parson’s Lane, the realtor warned us it was ‘full of character.’ That’s realtor speak for ‘it’s a hundred...

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The Static Kiss

The night of February 12th started like any other: I was in bed, the TV murmuring from the living room, a cup of lukewarm tea on the nightstand. My thoughts,...

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The Concrete Leviathan

The fabric of our family was held together by a patchwork of potlucks and funeral casseroles. With sixteen siblings on my mother’s side alone, our gatherings were a sea of...

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The Missing Marble

The trouble began in November, when something with cold, hard hands tried to smother me in my sleep. I woke up gasping, my throat raw, with the imprint of fingers...

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The Porcelain Fingers

My grandmother kept a cabinet of curiosities in the back parlor, a dusty shrine to a life she never spoke of. I was six when I first noticed the porcelain...

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The Weight of Still Water

It was the summer of 2016 when the rains came to the valley. The creek that ran behind our house swelled into a brown, roaring beast, and for three days...

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The Waking Room

The house leaned against the hillside like a tired animal, its wooden bones groaning with every shift of wind. I’d moved in eight months ago, drawn by the cheap rent...

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The Salt in the Walls

Our new house in the hollow of Red Creek was a Victorian relic, all peeling wallpaper and sagging floors. My parents bought it for a song, charmed by the wrap-around...

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The Mirror’s Empty Orbit

When I was seven, I found my mother’s locket tucked beneath a pile of silk scarves in her dressing room. It was a small, tarnished thing with a clasp that...

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