Ghost stories from Kentucky

The Concrete’s Mercy

The house on Maple Street had always felt like a living thing to me, breathing through its creaking joints and sighing through its drafty vents. After the incident with the...

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The Static in the Walls

In the autumn of 1999, I moved from a cramped apartment in the city to a sprawling Victorian house in the quiet, tree-lined suburb of Cedar Hollow. The house, with...

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The Shelf Above

My first week at Blackwood University was a blur of orientation events, icebreakers, and campus tours. The dorm, Ashford Hall, was old, with creaking floors and radiators that clanked like...

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The Kettle’s Long Whistle

Marta had lived in the old farmhouse for eighteen months before the first oddity. She’d expected something sooner, given her history—three of her last four homes had thrown spectral tantrums....

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The Last Breath of Room 37

It wasn’t the crumbling facade of the old Mercy Falls Sanatorium that unsettled me; it was the silence around it. The building squatted on a hill above the town of...

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The Door That Swung Wide

In the autumn of 2008, my husband and I moved into a converted Victorian mansion on the outskirts of a fading mill town. The house had been a school, then...

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The Camper’s Thirst

The first time I noticed it, I was twelve, lying in bed in our new house on Cedar Lane. The moon cast a pale square on the wall, and I...

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The Visitor at the Gilded Lily

My parents had dragged me along on their business trip to the city of Meridian, a place of glass towers and tangled freeways that seemed to swallow the sky. They...

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The Flashbulb’s Relic

I remember the day we moved into the old farmhouse on Cedar Hollow Road. The realtor called it ‘quaint,’ but the moment I stepped through the wide, weathered door, I...

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The Derby Specter

It was a humid August night, and I was deep into a marathon of an old RPG, the kind with pixelated forests and endless fetch quests. My apartment, a two-bedroom...

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The Stench of the Hollow

My grandmother always said the woods behind our farm were a place of peace. She’d tell me stories of the old spirits that watched over the land, how they’d guide...

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The Cradle of Ash

My aunt Cora, my cousin Tess, and I rented a converted lighthouse on a stormy stretch of coastline for the weekend. The lighthouse, named ‘The Sentinel,’ stood on a rocky...

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The Salt Famine

The night the power grid collapsed was the same night Mara’s tongue turned to desert. She blamed the cheap instant noodles she’d been living on, the ones that promised flavor...

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The Cold Room of Marrow House

I’d always prided myself on being the rational one, the skeptic who laughed at ghost stories and dismissed every shadow as a trick of the light. My girlfriend, Lena, was...

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The Third Weight

The first time it happened, I convinced myself it was a night terror. The second time, I blamed the new medication. But the third time, I knew something was in...

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The Grimoire Beneath the Blackwater

My brother-in-law, Dale, and I were after flathead catfish in the old mill pond behind Grandpa’s place in the Ozarks. We’d been out since dusk, but the fish weren’t biting,...

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The Sinking Hollow

Our new home in the dusty outskirts of Marfa, Texas, was a fixer-upper with peeling paint and a wrap-around porch that groaned underfoot. My sister Lena, her two daughters, and...

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The Weight of Stillness

It was late autumn, and the old farmhouse creaked with every gust of wind that rattled the bare branches of the orchard outside. I had just finished my nightly ritual:...

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The Hum of the Weeping Tile

The farmhouse had a way of holding onto heat, even in the deep autumn. That night, the air in the living room was thick with it, clinging to my skin...

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The Brown-Eyed Groomer

My friend Maya has always been a bit strange, claiming she could see things others couldn’t. I never doubted her, not after the night she woke up screaming in my...

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The Tenant in the Root Cellar

It all began when I was eleven, the year my mother died of a wasting sickness that shrank her to a whisper of herself. My father had let her burial...

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The Glass-Eyed Woman

When Marcus and I first bought the old farmhouse at the end of Hollow Creek Road, we laughed at the stories the realtor told us. ‘Nothing but creaky floors and...

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