Ghost stories from Mississippi

The Train at the Edge of the Lake

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had a knack for seeing things that others can’t. I’m not talking about ghosts in the corner of your eye or cold spots...

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The Blue-Suited Boy

I was twelve when we moved into that house, a narrow two-story box of weathered clapboard on the edge of a dying town in rural Arkansas. The nearest neighbor was...

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The Last Crossing

I remember the summer of ’89, when I was nine, my family moved into a farmhouse on the edge of a town that was already dying. The house was a...

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The Kitchen Helper

My name is Cora. I live in a quiet neighborhood in a small city. When I tell people about my kitchen visitor, they smile and think I am being funny....

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The Switchboard

I live in an old house in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a place my grandmother left me. The nearest town is a twenty-minute drive, and the nearest...

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The Last Ticking of the Clockwork Dog

I once read that animals who are deeply bonded to their humans can sense when their purpose in that life is complete. They know when they are needed and when...

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The Photos at Elm Creek

My family has lived in the old house on Elm Creek for generations. My cousin Lena lives there now with her husband and their two young boys. She told me...

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The Glazed Over Field

The old farmhouse stood on a vast expanse of land that seemed to swallow the horizon. It was a place where the wind whispered secrets through the skeletal branches of...

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The Hollow Hours

Lena had always prided herself on her rationality. At twenty-two, she had left the cramped apartment she shared with her mother in the coastal town of Marrow’s End, moving inland...

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The Woven Dark

The fear started in the yellow house on Maple Street, the one with the porch that sagged like a tired old dog. I was six, and the hallway to my...

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The Tape Under the Floorboards

My grandmother left us her old farmhouse in the bristlecone pines, a place where the wind never stops its low, dry moan through the cracks. I moved in after the...

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The Laughing Jester of Marrow Lane

My name is Elara Finch, and for as long as I can remember, a figure has haunted my dreams. It began when I was seven, in the rambling Victorian house...

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The Salt-Rotted Door

I never believed in the kind of horror that creeps up on you slowly, the kind that settles into your bones like damp. I was a thirty-two-year-old carpenter, hands calloused...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Ledger

I’ve always had a way with the unseen, though I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut about it. My grandmother called it ‘the sight,’ but it’s less about seeing and...

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The Last Train to Morrow

I never believed in ghosts—not really. Not until the summer I turned nineteen, when I took a job as a night janitor at the old Union Station. The city had...

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The Gravel and the Cypress

I’m writing this from a farmhouse in the Louisiana backwoods, where the humidity clings like a second skin and the nearest neighbor is six miles of gravel road away. My...

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The Cold Room

I had always scoffed at the idea of ghosts. To me, they were just figments of overactive imaginations, helped along by bad horror movies and cheap thrills. So when I...

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The Bedroom Ember

In the autumn of 2019, I was house-sitting for my aunt in the small town of Millbrook, a place so quiet that even the wind seemed to hold its breath....

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The Blue of the Morning

The house on Cedar Lane was a squat, brick ranch-style building with a low-sloping roof, a relic from the late ’60s that had seen better decades. When we moved in,...

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The Unmade Bed

The clock read 5:32 AM when I finally gave up on sleep. The Pillow, that lumpy, misshapen thing I’d been fighting with all night, had slid off the mattress again,...

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The Hollow Vase

In the small coastal town of Saltmarsh, where the fog rolled in like a gray tide and the seagulls cried like lost souls, there lived a woman named Elara. She...

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The Winter Room

The winter room was the only place in Great-Uncle Theo’s house that felt like it belonged to another world. Summer or winter, the rest of the house was a furnace,...

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The Mangled Broadcast

My old friend Dell had a way of drawing in things that should stay buried. I’d heard enough over the years to learn not to ask, but one night in...

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The Laughing Vending Machine

I’d been working the night shift at the Cedar Creek Quik-Stop for about three months, a lonely outpost off the interstate where the forest pressed close on three sides and...

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