Ghost stories from Maine

The Shattered Vessel

Mara and I had been friends since we were kids, but it wasn’t until that summer in the abandoned farmhouse that we truly tested the limits of our bond. We’d...

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The Hollow Gate

It was the last week of September, 2014. I was thirteen, and my best friend, Mira, was twelve. We were having a sleepover at her grandmother’s old farmhouse, a place...

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The Apron in the Frost

The winter air bit at our cheeks as my boys and I trudged up the gravel path toward the old orchard. It was a gray December afternoon, the kind that...

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The Cellar of the Hungry Root

The summer I turned twelve, my parents sent me to stay with my Aunt Rosa and Uncle Carl at their new place in the hills of West Virginia. They’d bought...

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The Man in the Blue Uniform

The first strange thing I noticed about the house on Birchwood Lane was the way the floorboards creaked in patterns, as if someone was walking just behind me, matching my...

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The Persistent Footsteps

The farmhouse on Cinder Lane had been in our family for generations, but I never questioned the weight of its history until I was old enough to understand the sound...

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The Porch Light Watcher

My friend Callum and I had been through a lot together since childhood—camping trips that turned into survival tests, road trips that ended in strange towns, and a shared love...

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The Hollow in the Pines

The memory has always been a splinter in my mind, but it wasn’t until I was much older that it started to fester. It happened when I was six, during...

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The Watching Grid

The mobile home park was called Oak Haven, though the only oaks were scraggly saplings planted along the main road. We’d bought the place in June, a double-wide with beige...

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The Cartographer’s Burden

I suppose there is a certain irony in the fact that I, who have spent my life mapping the invisible, should now be haunted by a map. For thirty years,...

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The Photograph That Wouldn’t Stay Still

The fire at the Marlow house took everything that mattered to me. My best friend, Dana, lost her little brother, Owen, who was only seven. He had a smile that...

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The Fevered Visitor

Every June, my parents shipped me off to my grandmother’s farm in the dusty Texas panhandle while they took their annual trip to the Bahamas. The farm was a lonely...

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The Map of Unfinished Rooms

In the autumn of 2004, I was seeing a woman named Elara, whom I’d known since college. She had inherited her late father’s property in the rolling hills of western...

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The Custodian’s Mark

The old lighthouse keeper, Silas, had always been a man of routine, his days dictated by the turning of the lamp and the ebb and flow of the tide. But...

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The Weeping Window

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. I’d spent my childhood in my grandmother’s house, a creaking Victorian that my great-uncle had built from a kit, and I’d heard all...

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The Message in the Attic

My grandfather insisted he heard murmurs coming from the attic. He described them as quiet voices recounting stories from his youth, like a living memory. My sister and I decided...

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The Night in the Woods

When he was younger, my uncle Sam had a reputation for being a bit reckless. He enjoyed his nights out with friends, often exploring the wild areas near their hometown....

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The Carbide Lantern

Old Man Hollis never talked about the night his engine died on the Mountain Loop Road. He’d spit tobacco and change the subject if you brought it up, his gnarled...

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The Radiator’s Pulse

The winter in that city had a way of seeping into your bones, no matter how many layers you wore. I lived in a third-floor walk-up on the east side,...

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The Marble Gaze

Mina had always found comfort in the quiet halls of the Fernwood Sanatorium, a grand, decaying building perched on the cliffs overlooking the gray Atlantic. It had been converted into...

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The Garden of Salt and Rust

The house at 14 Merrow Lane had a garden that refused to die. My grandmother called it her ‘memory patch’, though she never explained what that meant. She tended it...

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The Weight of a Promise

I was raised in a household where the veil between worlds was thinner than most. My grandmother could read omens in the flight of sparrows, and my uncle swore he’d...

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Secrets of the Old House

In a quiet village in Vermont, there stood an ancient house that had seen better days. I didn’t know much about its past, and perhaps I never would, but it...

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The String’s Reach

The house on Hemlock Lane was a relic of a bygone era, its Victorian bones creaking under layers of peeling paint and neglect. We moved in during the autumn, when...

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