Ghost stories from Missouri

The Flicker at the Linen Closet

The year was 1997, and I was nine years old. My mother and I were staying at my great-aunt Mildred’s house, a sprawling Victorian with a turret that leaned like...

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The Keeper of the Spindle

My fascination with the unseen began in childhood, when I’d catch flickers of figures at the edge of my vision. By my teens, I’d devoured every tome on spectral phenomena,...

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The Hollow Cabinet

It was the summer of 2019, and I was drowning in the kind of boredom that makes you count the cracks in the sidewalk. My friend Maya and I had...

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The Crayon Ledger

The house on Maple Street had always been trouble, but my parents insisted it was all in our heads. We were the new family in a dying mill town, and...

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The Clay Jar’s Debt

My earliest memory of the anomaly was the summer I turned seven, on my father’s sprawling, half-ruined vineyard in the arid hills of Andalusia. My parents had split when I...

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The Weight of August

The summer of 2009, in the dusty outskirts of Ashburn, Georgia, I turned seventeen. My family attended the First Baptist Church every Sunday, and I sang in the youth choir....

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The Hollow in the Board

I moved back in with my mother when I was twenty-four, after my marriage collapsed and I had nowhere else to go. She lived in a small town in the...

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The Velvet Visitor

The first time I saw her, I was five years old, standing in the hallway of our new house in the dusty town of Morrow Creek. The moving boxes were...

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The Balloon Release

I never would have guessed that the murder of my fourth cousin, Evelyn Marsh, in the sweltering summer of 1968, would be the seed of the strange events that later...

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The Six That Stay

The house on Cedar Lane had always been a haven for strays. My parents, ever soft-hearted, took in any dog that wandered onto the porch, and over the years, the...

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The Hum Under the Burials

My grandmother’s house sat on a flat stretch of prairie, ten miles from the nearest town, with a dozen low, grassy hummocks scattered across the property like the backs of...

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The Hollow Frame

It happened a few years back, but the memory hasn’t faded; it’s etched into my bones like frost. My partner, Adrian, and our friend, Marcus, were driving aimlessly through the...

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The Uninvited Sheath

My grandmother’s farmhouse sat on a hill overlooking a valley that seemed to hold the fog like a bowl holds water. I was nine when my father inherited it after...

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The Damp Man in the Corner

In the autumn of 2011, I moved with my partner, Marcus, into a two-story townhouse on the edge of a sleepy coastal town. The place was drafty, with creaky floorboards...

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The Figure on the Bare Mattress

My name is Ellen, and I’m about to tell you something that happened to me and my partner, Tom, when we rented a two-story house on the outskirts of a...

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The Last Train to Meridian

The first seven years of my life were a blank slate, a void where memories should have been. I was a quiet child, prone to long silences and staring at...

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The Visitor at Dawn

The clock on the nightstand glowed 5:32 AM. I was drifting in that shallow, pre-dawn sleep when a small hand pressed my shoulder. My oldest, eight-year-old Caleb, stood beside the...

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The Third Floor Visitor

I was fourteen, living in a cramped two-story house on the edge of Gray Hollow. The place had a strange smell, like wet plaster and cold dust, and the stairs...

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The Mangy Jackal’s Invitation

The summer I turned fifteen, my cousin Mara and I were staying at our grandmother’s farm in the dust-blown flats of West Texas. The nearest neighbor was three miles down...

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The Cardboard Crown

My grandmother’s house always smelled of mothballs and dust, but the storage unit attached to it was a different beast entirely. It was a concrete tomb, cold and echoing, where...

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The Locket of Hollow Creek

The spring thaw had turned the dirt roads of southern Indiana into a muddy slick, and our family van crawled along them like a beetle on a pane of glass....

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The Tenant in the Walls

When I was nine, my father inherited a crumbling Victorian from a great-uncle he’d never met. We moved from our sunlit ranch house into that drafty, timbered mausoleum, and my...

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The Three A.M. Visitor

When I was seven, my cousin Marcus and I often slept on the floor of the spare room at our grandmother’s farmhouse to escape the stifling summer heat. The room...

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The Shadows Behind the Curtain

When I was about six years old, my sister and I would lay out blankets on the floor whenever the summer heat became unbearable. In the coolness of our living...

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