Ghost stories from Iowa

The Ceramic Sentinel

My brother and I used to spend our summers at our grandmother’s house in the countryside, a creaky old farmhouse surrounded by fields of yellow grass that whispered in the...

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The Sunlit Pants

In the autumn of 2011, my old colleague Marcus called me from a clinic in the countryside. He asked if I could look after his farmhouse and his two Maine...

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The Vanishing Checkered Man

I first stumbled upon that corner of the internet during a humid July, when my summer job at the county archives had dried up and left me with nothing but...

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The Stubble Field Vigil

It has been twenty years since that autumn night on my cousin’s farm in the Nebraska Sandhills, yet the memory remains as sharp as the dry, cracked earth of that...

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The Lantern’s Debt

In the autumn of my eighteenth year, I thought I understood the dark. I had walked the back roads of Cinder Hollow at midnight, counted stars through the pines, and...

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The Stone-Breaker’s Grin

The cellar had always been a quiet place, smelling of earth and old timber. I descended the wooden stairs, a basket of damp laundry balanced on my hip, while the...

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The Lantern in the Hollow

On the last day of May, 2019, I was driving back to Ohio from a solo trip to Montana and the Dakotas. My favorite film, since I was a kid,...

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The Pale Silhouettes

The night had settled over the small town of Ashford like a damp blanket, pressing down on the rooftops and muffling every sound. Inside the modest apartment on the third...

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The Silo’s Lament

The Redmond place sat at the end of a gravel road that seemed to go nowhere, nestled between vast, undulating fields of corn that turned brown and brittle by late...

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The Last Tenant

The house at the end of Juniper Lane had been empty for nine years, ever since old Mr. Harlow passed away. My father owned it, along with a handful of...

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The Third Gate

My partner in these excursions, Jules, had a theory about the old ironwork gate that leaned against the fence at the edge of the Marrowbone Preserve. ‘It’s a hinge,’ she...

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The Hips That Remember

In the winter of 2018, I was sixteen and living in a small, creaking flat above my grandmother’s bakery. The building was old, with pipes that groaned and floorboards that...

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The Floor in Room Seven

My mother had a way of explaining away the impossible. When I was nine, I woke to find my mattress tilting, as if something beneath was trying to flip me...

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The Vent Watcher

The summer I turned nine, my parents moved us from our cramped apartment into a sprawling Victorian on the edge of Maplewood. It had four bedrooms, a turret, and a...

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The Hollow by the Ice-Flower Field

My obsession with the unseen began in the summer I turned nine, the year my father took the caretaker’s job at the abandoned Silvervein Hotel, a skeletal stone relic perched...

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The Folding Hour

My little brother, Leo, is five. He’s always had an imaginary friend—most kids do. But last week, I heard him chattering away in his room, his voice light and happy,...

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The Cipher in the Floorboards

In the autumn of 2003, I was twenty and restless, craving the kind of nightlife that only a city could offer, but my fake ID was flimsier than a wet...

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The Last Tenant of Nine Pines

I was sorting through my grandmother’s belongings after her funeral when I found the envelope. It was tucked behind a loose board in the attic of the house she left...

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The Laughing Mannequin

It began with the mannequin. Not the kind you see in department stores, but the one my Aunt Rosa used to sew dresses on. It stood in the corner of...

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The Lantern in the Root Cellar

The first time I heard about it was from my grandmother, not my mother, though my mother was the one who saw it. It happened long before I was born,...

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The Violet Room

I was seventeen when I learned that some doors should never be opened, even in dreams. That summer, my family rented a cramped cabin in the backwoods of Maine, far...

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The Amber Plateau

My name is Elara, and for as long as I can remember, the world has been thin for me. My mother, grandmother, and even my younger brother, Tomas, have all...

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The Lantern in the Smoke

I was six when the world tilted sideways and never straightened. My older brother, Elias, and I were cutting through the industrial district, a shortcut home from the grocer’s. The...

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The Long Road Through Pines

Day three. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but I was already on the road. My name is Maggie, and I work the night shift at the all-night diner in Millbrook....

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