Ghost stories from Massachusetts

The Iron Peddler’s Inheritance

It was the summer of 2003, and my name is Clara. After a brutal battle with ovarian cancer, I had to leave my job as a bookkeeper and find solace...

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The Pad of Unfinished Faces

In the autumn of 1959, I was a boy of eight, and my universe was a cramped apartment above a bakery in the industrial town of Millbrook. The walls were...

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The Last Bell on Mulberry Lane

The Mulberry Lane School stood like a red brick monument to endurance, its windows staring out at the town like tired eyes. We were twenty-two children in 1955, but by...

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The Cold Room’s Last Tenant

The winter that year buried our valley under a blanket of snow so deep that the fences vanished and the world shrank to a white silence broken only by the...

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The Gate That Sang in August

In the summer of 1967, I was sixteen, and the world had shrunk to the size of our farm’s fence lines. My father, a man of few words and fewer...

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The Ledger of Buried Streams

The farmhouse sat like a forgotten tooth in the jaw of the hills, its white paint peeling in long, pale strips that curled away from the wood like dead skin....

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The Orchard Gate

I was sixty-seven when I began writing this, though the events I am about to recount happened when I was nine, in the summer of 1962. My name is not...

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The Anatomy of Dusk

I first noticed them in the fall of my ninth year, when the leaves in the courtyard of St. Dymphna’s Home for Boys turned the color of bruised plums. The...

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The Hollow Echo of the Orchard

The day I dismissed Mara, the one who had watched over my sleep since childhood, the air in my apartment changed. It wasn’t sudden, but by the third morning, I...

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The Empty Cradle

When we bought the old farmhouse on Cedar Lane, we thought we had found our forever home. The sprawling yard, the wraparound porch, the ancient oak that shaded the whole...

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The Wall That Breathed

When I moved into the flat above the old bakery on Fenwick Road, the rent was so low I suspected something was off. But I needed a place quickly, and...

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The Hovering Hare

It was a Tuesday night in late October, if I recall correctly, about five years ago, when the first incident occurred. I was living alone in a small, drafty cottage...

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The Smell of Rotting Apples

I have always been attuned to the strange, the unexplainable, the things that lurk just beyond the veil of the ordinary. My childhood was steeped in it, a constant undercurrent...

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The Road By The Reclamation Pit

In the late autumn of 1981, when I was just eleven, my family lived on the outskirts of Millbrook, a small town in upstate New York, bordered by an old,...

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The Ceiling’s Hum

I was seven, in the autumn of 1987, living in a rented house in the town of Millbrook, New York. The house was an old Victorian with a wide wraparound...

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The Night the Figure Sat on the Bed

I’ve always been a practical person, quick to dismiss the unexplained as coincidence or misremembering. But there’s one night from my teenage years that I can’t quite shake, even now,...

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The Board Game Boy

Our house in Essex, Massachusetts, had stood since 1770, a crooked, salt-worn colonial that creaked like a ship at anchor. I was seven in 1982, and my world was small:...

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The Fourth Cat

I still live with my parents, and I’ve gotten used to the rhythm of early alarms and the shuffle of slippers on hardwood. But this particular morning, I woke to...

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The Marrow Cage

Evelyn Marsh had always been a light sleeper, but the episodes that plagued her nights were something else entirely. It started in her late twenties, shortly after she moved into...

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The Vermilion Gate

In the fall of 1974, the Calloway family moved into a weathered Victorian on the outskirts of Blackwood Creek, a town known for its endless autumns and the constant whisper...

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The Constant Tremor

I’ve spent many nights scrolling through this site, devouring every story you’ve all shared. I never thought I’d contribute my own, but what happened in that building won’t stop haunting...

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The Perpetual Hum

After my grandmother passed, my parents offered me the old caretaker’s cottage behind their house. It was a cramped, two-room place with its own entrance, and they thought I’d appreciate...

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The Portrait in the Parlor

In the damp autumn of 1987, I lived with my mother and younger brother in a two-story Victorian house in the outskirts of Providence, Rhode Island. The house had a...

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The Briar Path

The place was called the Stillwater Sanctuary, a rambling old farmhouse converted into a yoga studio and meditation center. It sat at the end of a winding gravel road, surrounded...

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