Ghost stories from Maine

The Auctioneer’s Ledger

Elaine, a sprightly 87-year-old with a passion for porcelain, had just returned from the Coldwater Estate Auction. Her prize: a collection of antique dolls, their painted faces cracked with age,...

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Agnes had always collected trinkets, but her latest acquisition from a dusty estate sale had a peculiar allure. Nestled among tarnished silverware and moth-eaten tapestries were a dozen antique porcelain...

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The Collector and the Porcelain Guests

An elderly woman named Beatrice had a passion for collecting antique porcelain figures. At a recent estate sale, she acquired a large collection of delicate figurines from the Victorian era....

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The Curve of Clay Lane

I never remembered the incident myself, not until my mother mentioned it at my grandmother’s funeral. We were standing in the front parlor of her house on Clay Lane, a...

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The Last Cigarette

The summer after my great-uncle Elbert died, I agreed to stay with my great-aunt Mabel in her old farmhouse on the edge of the bog. She had no one else,...

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The Comfort of Static

Elara and her husband, Dominic, moved into their home in the rural outskirts of a small town, where the fields stretched like gray quilts under a perpetual overcast sky. They...

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The Hollow Hour

At 3:13 in the afternoon, the sky turned the color of an old bruise. The solar eclipse had come to our valley, and with it, a silence so complete that...

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The Orchard’s Gift

I grew up on the edge of a town that had no right to be called a town. It was just a scattering of houses along a gravel road, with...

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The Salt-Stained Ledger

The town of Marrow’s Edge had a story about a woman named Etta Harlow, though most folks just called her the Salt-Witch. She’d been a midwife and herbwoman who lived...

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The Stitched Map

The first time I saw them, I was nine, standing in the dusty attic of our hundred-year-old farmhouse in northern Minnesota. They were not shadows, not exactly, but something darker...

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The Porcelain Visitor

The evening had settled into its familiar hum: the clatter of forks, the low murmur of the news, the comforting smell of my mother’s meatloaf. I sat with my back...

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The Ward of Unfinished Sentences

The summer heat clung to the asphalt of the old county highway like a second skin, and the air shimmered with a haze that made the distant pines wobble. My...

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The Basement Office

When I started working as a custodian at the old Meridian Civic Hall, I knew it had a history. The building had been a hospital during the war, then a...

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The Unseen Playmate

The first time Maya noticed it was the summer her son turned three. They had moved into the old Cartwright house on Maple Street, a sprawling Victorian with creaking floorboards...

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The Weaver’s Light

I’ve lived in this old farmhouse at the edge of the black pine forest for over twenty years now. The house was built in the 1800s, and it creaks and...

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The Door That Breathed

The last night in Tucson, we were at a rundown pizza joint that smelled of grease and regret. My aunt Thelma slid her phone across the sticky table, her eyes...

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The Keeper of the Root Cellar

It began with a move to an isolated island off the coast of Maine, a place called Cradle Rock, where the fog rolled in like a grey tide and the...

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The Persistent Heat

When I was thirteen and my sister Nadia was sixteen, our family moved into a rundown Victorian house at the edge of a dying town. My parents claimed the downstairs...

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The Iron Veil

The year I turned forty, I decided to document every headstone in the old Hilliard Falls cemetery. My wife, Clara, thought it was a morbid hobby, but she humored me,...

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The Dressmaker’s Fog

I never believed in ghosts. Not back then, not even when the fog rolled in off the river every autumn like a wet blanket. But that fog, it wasn’t the...

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The Cinder Man

In the autumn of 1984, I was a new student at Thornwood Academy, a boarding school nestled in the hills of western Massachusetts. The main building, Ashford Hall, had been...

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The Hollow Light Well

When I was nine, my mother and her new husband moved us from our cramped Boston walk-up to a tenement in the Milltown Flats. The building was a monstrosity of...

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The Coal Room

We called it the coal room, though it hadn’t held coal in decades. It was just a small, windowless space off the kitchen, with a heavy iron door that my...

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The Salt-Marsh Lullaby

I was fifteen when my mother and her new husband shipped me off to a wilderness camp on a barrier island off the Georgia coast. They called it ‘Cormorant Island,’...

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