Ghost stories from Massachusetts

The Papered Window

I moved into the Cranfield House in the autumn of 2019, taking the top-floor attic room. The house was a sprawling Queen Anne Victorian, painted a faded mustard yellow, with...

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The Gate in the Hedge

The summer I turned thirty, I inherited my great-aunt’s cottage in the hills of western Virginia. It was a ramshackle place, all peeling paint and crooked shutters, set at the...

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The Lemon Rind Covenant

I had always considered my great-grandmother, Elara Voss, a quaint relic of a bygone era. Her stories of the old country, her insistence on keeping windows shuttered during the day,...

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The Hollow Kettle

For years, I kept a ledger of the wrongs I had done, each entry scratched in ink that smelled of burnt copper. It was a habit I inherited from my...

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The Orb of Constance Vane

I never thought much about the drive through Larkspur that autumn afternoon. My grandmother, whom I adored more than anyone, had taken me along for a routine errand to pick...

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The Constant Static

The first time the dead typed to me, I was twenty-two, sitting in a diner with a cup of coffee I couldn’t afford. My phone buzzed—not a ring, not a...

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The Cartographer’s Last Map

I never believed in the maps my grandmother drew. She spent her final years hunched over a drafting table in her cramped attic, tracing coastlines that didn’t exist, mountains that...

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The Tarnished Frame

The house on Cedar Lane had always been a bit too quiet, even for a place nestled in the woods. I lived there with my mother, my sister having just...

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The Lantern in the Rain

The house sat at the edge of a sprawling cranberry bog, its paint peeling like sunburned skin. My father, Roland, had taken the caretaker job after the mill shut down,...

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The Green Throne

After the divorce, my mother packed us into the old station wagon and drove us to our grandparents’ place in the hills. It was a Victorian relic, all creaking wood...

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The Basement of Unfinished Things

When my sister Cora’s body finally surrendered to the disease that had been gnawing at her for years, we made the decision to move her and her two boys into...

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The Weight of the Left Hand

The first thing I remember about the house on Culvert Lane was the smell of damp plaster and the way the hallway light always flickered, even with new bulbs. We...

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The Ledger in the Crawlspace

The house on Meridian Lane was a monument to post-war optimism: a low-slung rancher with a pale yellow siding that glowed like a sickly sun at dusk, set amid a...

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The Hourglass Ward

The ward was a place of rigid order, a corridor of identical doors in a hospital that smelled of antiseptic and decay. I was a night orderly, and my name...

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The Porcelain Game

My name is Elara, and I have always seen things others cannot. As a child, I thought the flickering shapes at the edge of my vision were just tricks of...

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The Tenant Above the Sewer

In the autumn of 1998, I moved into a basement apartment on the corner of Ash and Filbert, in a tired neighborhood of a city I’d only seen from the...

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The Pillow That Breathes

When Lena and Marcus moved into the old farmhouse on Cedar Hollow Road, they were charmed by its creaking porches and the wild roses that climbed the trellis. The landlord,...

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The Unseen Passenger

I hadn’t planned to walk home that Saturday. The heat was oppressive, and my usual shortcut through the old industrial district was a maze of cracked asphalt and abandoned warehouses....

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The Static Between Stations

The summer I turned twelve, my parents bought an old farmhouse on the edge of a town called Meridian. It was a place that seemed to exist only in the...

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The Warden of the Iron Orchard

I have never believed in ghosts. I still don’t, not exactly. But what happened in that house, and later in the woods, has left me with a permanent knot in...

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The Unraveling Thread

I was twelve, the summer before seventh grade, when we moved to the old farmhouse on the edge of Salem, Ohio. My parents had inherited it from a great-aunt I’d...

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The Carousel of Unfinished Things

It began on a Greyhound bus slicing through the Nevada desert, the kind of trip where the landscape blurs into a monotone of sand and scrub. I was dozing against...

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The Rug Seller’s Hive

In the autumn of 1992, after the hurricane gutted the Florida coast, I found myself shuttling between Tampa and Miami, my son’s small hand in mine, until the sky turned...

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The Bough-Breaker’s Howl

In the summer of 1999, my husband and I inherited a parcel of land from my grandfather, a jagged swath of forest and field at the edge of the Berkshires....

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