Ghost stories from Massachusetts

The Casket Maker’s Apprentice

I’ve spent my life in houses with dead people’s leftover habits. The first was a narrow Victorian with a basement where a man named Ezra had chopped kindling for thirty...

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The Weight of Worn Things

Ever since I can remember, certain rooms have pressed against my skull like a too-tight crown. It would start as a dull throb behind my eyes, then bloom into a...

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The Shelf That Moved

When I was four, my family lived in a small apartment above my grandfather’s antique shop. My room was a converted storage closet, barely big enough for a twin bed...

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The Pale-Lit Visitor

When I was eight, we lived in a rust-belt town called Harrow Creek, in a house that leaned like a tired dog. My mother worked nights at the truck stop,...

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The Pine Watcher

Growing up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, my world was defined by the dense forest that bordered our property. I spent countless afternoons among the tall pines,...

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The Pale Figure at the Glass

The first time I saw the dead, I was five, and we lived in a crumbling walk-up on the fourth floor of a building that smelled of boiled cabbage and...

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The Hollow Locket

The old farmhouse sat at the edge of a dying town, its white paint peeling like sunburned skin. I inherited it from my grandmother, along with the menagerie she’d kept...

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The Man Who Built the Walls

In the autumn of 2010, I acquired a modest house in a quiet corner of Maplewood, a small town nestled among the hills of western Massachusetts. The seller was an...

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The Tally Mark

I was a senior at Cedar Falls High, three weeks from graduation, and the only thing on my mind was the summer job I’d lined up at the auto garage...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Return

I had taken to walking my two Maltese, Pip and Squeak, through the old Ironwood Cemetery on the outskirts of Blackhollow. It was a place of rusted gates and tilted...

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The Ironwood Fire

It began with a client, a man named Julian Croft, who had the unsettling habit of finishing my sentences. I was a medium, or at least I had convinced myself...

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The Pavement Heart

My name is Iris, and I’ve spent all nineteen years of my life in the same house on Cedar Lane, a quiet street that curls like a sleeping snake through...

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The Empty Chair’s Typewriter

The house on Thornapple Lane had always hummed with a peculiar vibration, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath. After the night I saw the silhouette in my...

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The Unseen Tenant

Marcus had always been a rational man, a believer in science and the tangible world. So when the odd sensations began in his small, one-bedroom apartment on the third floor...

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The Tug at Dawn

For three weeks, I had been waking at the same ungodly hour, just before the sun crept over the ridge. It wasn’t the alarm clock or the neighbor’s rooster that...

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The Coin in the Lint Trap

The first time I noticed something wrong was with the laundry. I lived in a duplex on the edge of a town that had more churches than streetlights, but at...

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The Fifth Setting

My job at the Cresthaven Resort had been a quiet one, at least until the third week. I was hired as a banquet server, but with the summer weddings winding...

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The Third Floor Landing

The Pine Crest Motor Lodge was a relic from the days before the interstate, a two-story horseshoe of weathered timber and cracked asphalt that clung to the edge of the...

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The Ragged Man in the Linen Closet

My twin sister and I shared a bedroom in our grandmother’s old farmhouse, a creaking relic of the last century. The room was long and narrow, with a single window...

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The Attic Choir

I’d been living with my friend Marcus for six months when I learned why he never went into the attic. The house was an old Victorian, creaky and drafty, but...

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The Winter Heir

My name is Elias, and I’ve always felt a coldness in me that has nothing to do with the weather. It’s a presence, a weight that’s been with me since...

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The Last Tidal Pool

My grandmother raised me in a crooked little house on a cliff above the North Sea. The wind never stopped moaning through the cracks, and the salt ate the paint...

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The Last Tenant of Bramble Cottage

I spent my childhood in a crooked little cottage on the edge of a salt marsh, where the wind never stopped sighing through the reeds. My mother and I lived...

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The Granary Tapes

I never believed in ghosts, not really. I’d hear folks talk about a cold spot or a door that creaks on its own, and I’d think, ‘That’s just a draft,...

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