Ghost stories from Maine

The Static Visitor

I never believed in ghosts, not really. I was a man of science, a skeptic who chalked up every strange tale to overactive imaginations or faulty wiring in old houses....

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The Counting of Small Losses

Lena first noticed the missing key. It wasn’t a grand key, just a spare for the storage locker she never used. It hung on a hook by the door, a...

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The Painted Room

I never believed in haunted houses until we moved into the old farmhouse on Cinder Lane. My partner, Mira, and I had been looking for a place with character, and...

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The Unread Tarot of Hollow Creek

In the quiet town of Hollow Creek, where the fog rolled in like a shroud every night, there lived a young woman named Elara. She was a skeptic, a collector...

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The Ledger of December

Maren had always been meticulous, a quality that served her well as a restorer of antique clocks. In the weeks after she moved into the creaking farmhouse on the edge...

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The Stairwell Caster

It had been three weeks since the last time I saw him. I had started to believe that the unsettling presence in my apartment building’s corridor was just a figment...

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The Pale Observer

I first noticed it during the fall, when the maples along Willow Creek turned the color of old blood. I was in the kitchen, making toast, and I glanced out...

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The Green Lettering

The day I started keeping a journal was the day I realized the world had a thin layer of wrongness over it, like a film of oil on water. It...

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The Pantry Light

I never thought much about the pantry light. It was just a fluorescent tube that flickered every time the old farmhouse shifted on its foundation, which was often. I lived...

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The View From Above

It was a sweltering Tuesday in late July when I woke from a fitful nap, the kind that leaves you heavy-limbed and uncertain of the hour. I was sprawled on...

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The Box of Things Left Behind

I never heard the story from my father until I was seventeen, and even then, it came out in fragments, like he was pulling shards of glass from a wound...

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The Overflow Valve

I’m 52, a logistics consultant, and I’ve spent more nights in roadside motels than in my own bed. I don’t believe in ghosts, never have. But in October of 2021,...

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The Keeper of the Cistern

In the autumn of my junior year, I found myself at a party in the old Whittaker house, a sprawling Victorian that had been converted into a commune of sorts....

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The Hinge of the Harvest

The summer I turned seventeen, my cousin Vera invited me to stay at her family’s farm in the dusty folds of the San Joaquin Valley. The farm had been in...

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The Ceiling Fan’s Complaint

My name is Lena, and I’m thirteen. In the summer of 2018, my parents inherited a house from a distant uncle we barely knew. It was a sprawling, crooked Victorian...

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The Dressing Room Mirrors

The summer I turned sixteen, my parents sent me to the Ashford Repertory, a theater camp nestled in the hills of Vermont. The main building was a grand old opera...

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The Hall of Marble Steps

I was eight the autumn we moved into the old Marlowe House, a sprawling Victorian that had been converted into four apartments. Ours was the ground floor, a labyrinth of...

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The Figure at the Desk

I have always been drawn to the idea of the supernatural. Not in a fearful way, but with a kind of academic curiosity, like a paleontologist studying fossils. I devoured...

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The January Clearing

In the winter of 1998, I had been living in the small mountain town of Silver Hollow, Vermont, for about six months. I had moved there from the flatlands of...

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The Weight in the Hallway

At thirteen, I’d have laughed at anyone who claimed the dead could linger. My name is Elias, and I thought the whole idea of ghosts was just a bedtime story...

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The Lantern Room

My name is Theo, and when I was eleven, we moved into the Crestview House, a sprawling Victorian that had been empty for years. It wasn’t the house itself that...

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The Last Mass at St. Agatha’s

It began the Tuesday after Father Dominic left, and it hasn’t stopped since. The rectory at St. Agatha’s, a small stone church nestled in the maple woods, had always felt...

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The Fog That Knew Our Names

I grew up in a hollow of Vermont so deep the sun only visited between April and October. Our house sat on a crooked acre of land that had once...

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The Lantern in the Orchard

I should have written this down thirty years ago, when the details were still sharp and the fear wasn’t buried so deep. I was seven, maybe eight, living with my...

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