Ghost stories from Minnesota

The Count of the Empty Rooms

The move was supposed to be a fresh start for the Callahan family. For months, the sprawling Victorian on Arbor Street had been a promise of space and quiet after...

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The Stairwell Visitor

The house we moved into when I was nine was a sprawling Victorian relic, inherited from my grandmother’s estranged sister. It stood at the end of a gravel lane, its...

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The Unseen Dwellers

It started in the old mill town of Ashford, where the river ran black with tannin and the air smelled of wet wool. My great-aunt had left me her house,...

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The Quivering Gilt Frame

The house on Barlow Lane had been quiet for weeks, a fact that Mira had come to appreciate. She and her partner, Joel, had moved in just six months prior,...

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The Constant Refrain

The summer heat clung to the brick walls of my apartment like a second skin. I had taken the place for its proximity to the city’s music archives, a musty...

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The Last Pencil

The first time I noticed the pencil was during Mr. Harlow’s third-period algebra class. It lay on the floor by the radiator, a plain yellow Number 2 with the eraser...

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The Anniversary Clock

Marta and Elias had been married for twelve years, and their anniversary had always been a private ritual, a quiet celebration of their shared history. This year, they had chosen...

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The Cradle of Ash

The Pinehollow Historical Society had been our client before, but this time it felt different. They’d called us about the old Merriwether Farmhouse, a rambling Victorian that had stood empty...

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The Last Station

The Andean night swallowed the village of San Idelfonso like a held breath. I had arrived three weeks prior, sent by the university to catalog the colonial church’s archives. The...

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The Clatter in the Crawlspace

When we moved into the prefab on the edge of the Ponderosa Pines, I thought the creaks were just the house settling. The previous owners had left in a hurry,...

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The Halo of Static

The summer I turned twelve, my family moved into the Solano Arms, a sprawling, sun-faded apartment complex on the outskirts of Tucson. My mother worked the morning shift at a...

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The Fourth Exposure

The first time I noticed the gap was when I picked up the prints from the pharmacy. I’d been sorting through my grandmother’s old things after she passed, and I’d...

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The Tenant in the Walls

In the autumn of 2019, my husband and I bought a charming but aging Victorian house in the small town of Ashford, nestled among maple trees that turned fiery red...

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The Last Bus to Hollow Creek

It started with a note. Not the kind you leave for your mom or tape to the fridge, but a scrap of paper, yellowed and rough as if pulled from...

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The Stillness of Fernwood

When I first moved into the Fernwood Manor, it felt like stepping into a sunlit painting. The grand old house, with its wraparound porch and creaking floorboards, held seven adults...

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The Lamp and the Long Hall

The old farmhouse had been in Clara’s family for three generations, and the long hallway that ran the length of the upstairs had always felt like a spine to her....

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The Red Stitch in the Wall

The pines stood like patient mourners around our homestead, each one a dark sentinel that had watched the land since before my grandfather drove the first stake into the soil....

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The Croaking Hum

When I was eight, my family moved to a creaky old farmhouse on the edge of a town that seemed to have forgotten itself. My room was at the end...

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In the autumn of 1998, I was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student in Providence, Rhode Island, sharing a cramped two-bedroom apartment above a laundromat with my best friend, Marcus. The building...

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The Last Swing

In the town of Millbrook, there once stood a small white house with a wraparound porch and a backyard that sloped gently toward a creek. That house had been demolished...

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The Long Hair at the Foot of the Bed

After his father sold the old funeral parlor on Summit Avenue, my partner Marcus and I rented a modest apartment in the quieter part of Duluth. We’d been there for...

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The Midnight Kitchen of Cedar Hollow

My childhood home sat on the edge of Cedar Hollow, a town so small it didn’t appear on most maps. The house itself was a relic, built in the 1870s...

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The Lantern Keeper

My buddy Jake and I decided to hunt for bluegill on the old dredge pond outside of Millbrook, a place known for its overgrown banks and the kind of quiet...

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The Key in the Attic

When Evelyn’s fiancé, Marcus, inherited his uncle’s Victorian house in the remote town of Hollow Creek, she thought it was a fresh start. The house, with its sagging porch and...

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