Ghost stories from Missouri

The Weight of Watching

When I was nine, I learned that the walls of our new house in the dusty town of Redwood Falls could hold their breath. We had moved there after my...

Read Story →

The Green Pea Incident

My name is Elara, and I’m sixteen. Since we moved into this old farmhouse on the edge of Morrow’s Hollow, things have been… off. Not just strange, but specific. Every...

Read Story →

The Bone Parade

Ever since I started working at the county morgue, I’ve had this peculiar brand of insomnia. It’s not the kind where you lie awake staring at the ceiling; it’s the...

Read Story →

The Moth Collector’s Room

The house on Hemlock Lane was a Victorian relic, its gingerbread trim rotting like old teeth. My sister and I called it the Moth House, because every summer, hundreds of...

Read Story →

The Long Stairwell

I was nine, in Mrs. Kendrick’s class, when the new school year started at Hollow Creek Elementary. The building was old, with long, dim hallways and a stairwell that smelled...

Read Story →

The Vent’s Gaze

It started the winter after I moved into the old farmhouse on Hollow Creek Road. The house had stood empty for years, its bones creaking with age, and I was...

Read Story →

The Hour of the Needle

The moment I stepped into the Hotel Meridian, the air changed. It was heavy, like breathing through a wet wool blanket, and the musty scent of old carpet and forgotten...

Read Story →

The Static Child

The night the power went out, I was twelve, not fourteen. We lived in a house that leaned slightly to one side, as if it were perpetually bracing against the...

Read Story →

The Flicker Between Films

I moved into the Beacon Theatre Apartments in October, a year after the dry cleaner on the ground floor shuttered and the space became a repair shop for vintage electronics....

Read Story →

The Glass Ward

I remember the first thing that went wrong was the daffodils. They grew in a riot of yellow around the porch of the old farmhouse we’d rented, and I’d loved...

Read Story →

Prank Gone Too Far

Girls. Sleepovers. They were meant for each other. Especially when it’s just you and a friend that act as if you were sisters. Spending the night at my friend Angela’s...

Read Story →

The Thirteenth Candle

My thirteenth birthday fell on a Tuesday, the last day of October, and the air outside my window tasted of frost and fallen leaves. My name is Elena, and this...

Read Story →

The Hollow Call of the Cistern

In the quiet coastal town of Portharrow, where the sea mist rolled in like a shroud and the gulls cried with human sorrow, lived two sisters, Elara and Maren. Elara...

Read Story →

The Empty Setting

It wasn’t until the funeral was over and the casserole dishes were empty that the house seemed to exhale. Nora watched her mother’s friends drift through the kitchen like ghosts...

Read Story →

The Cartographer’s Game

Our old house on Maple Street had a basement that always felt colder than it should, even in July. I was eight when my little brother Theo turned three, and...

Read Story →

The Grain of the Pine

In the autumn of my fifteenth year, my family moved into a house that had sat empty for nearly a decade. The previous owners had left in haste, leaving behind...

Read Story →

The Room That Hungered

My daughter, Lily, was four when she started talking to the ceiling. Not in the way toddlers do, inventing imaginary friends to combat loneliness, but with a specific, unsettling focus....

Read Story →

The Last Broadcast of Channel 13

The summer I turned thirteen, my cousin Marcus and I were left to our own devices in my grandparents’ old farmhouse while they attended a funeral three counties over. The...

Read Story →

The Last Bus to Millbrook

I never thought I’d set foot in Millbrook again. Not after the accident. But when my cousin Derek died, I had no choice. He was murdered on a rainy Tuesday,...

Read Story →

The Night the Bedding Crawled

The farmhouse outside of Decatur, Illinois, had been in our family for generations. It was a place of creaking floorboards and drafty windows, but we kids loved it. My name...

Read Story →

The Visitor at 2:47

I was twelve that autumn, and my family had just moved into a sprawling Victorian house on the edge of a town that seemed to forget it existed. The house,...

Read Story →

The Mannequin’s Gaze

The first time I remember anything truly strange happening was during the winter I turned nine. We had just moved into a drafty old farmhouse at the edge of town,...

Read Story →

The Hollow Frame

The map was a lie, or perhaps it was just old. We’d spent three days chasing the ghost of a town called Mirefield, a name that had been scraped off...

Read Story →

The Weight of His Answer

For weeks, the dreams had been a slow poison. They started as whispers in the dark of my mind, then bloomed into vivid, violent bursts of passion I didn’t recognize....

Read Story →