Ghost stories from Missouri

The Man Who Sat in Chair Seven

In the autumn of 2019, I was a student at the Crestwood Academy of Cosmetology, a squat brick building on the edge of a town that smelled of wet leaves...

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The Tin Rooster’s Vigil

In the autumn of 2004, I moved with my two young daughters, Lily and Rose, into a dilapidated Victorian house on the outskirts of a small Nebraska town, hoping to...

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The Night Switch

My partner, Lena, and I moved into the top-floor unit of the Brindle Building about eighteen months ago. It’s a converted warehouse, all exposed brick and high ceilings, with wide...

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The Cardboard Box

I never told anyone about the cardboard box. It sat in the corner of my childhood bedroom, unremarkable, filled with old books and forgotten toys. But I knew it wasn’t...

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The Pale Visitor of Ash Grove

I was nine the summer my parents moved us to the old farmhouse on the edge of Ash Grove. My room was in the attic, and the only window looked...

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The Blue Tide

I’ve always been skeptical of the stories my grandmother told about the old house. She claimed it was ‘alive’ in a way, that it remembered things, and that certain corners...

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The Brass Arbor

The first thing I noticed that morning was the weight. Not heavy, but present, like a copper penny balanced on a shelf. I was brushing my teeth, the mirror fogged...

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The Recess of the Walls

It began three months after we moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the wood, a place that had stood since the 1920s but had been modernized by...

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The Painted Smile

It started with a chipped porcelain angel, a thrift store find from a dusty shelf in a town I barely remember. My daughter, Nora, had taken to it instantly, cradling...

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The Weight of the Dark

My apartment has always had a peculiar draft, a cold breath that seems to seep through the walls, especially at night. I’ve learned to ignore it, like the creaking of...

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The Kettle’s Chime

The farm my grandfather called Ironroot sat in a shallow valley where the prairie met the scrub oak woods, outside a town that had no name worth remembering. Every summer,...

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The Boiler Room’s Second Door

My niece, Clara, came over for Sunday dinner. My mother needed a lift to her evening pottery class, and Clara was due for her archery practice. We finished the pot...

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The Unseen Visitor

It was nearly midnight when the house settled into its usual silence. The children were tucked in, their doors ajar, with the soft static of the baby monitors filling the...

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The Still Air

The kitchen of our rented farmhouse always felt like a time capsule, stuck in a decade that no one remembered. The walls were a faded mustard, the linoleum curled at...

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The Concrete Hollow

We moved to the outskirts of Maple Hollow, a town so damp that even the mailboxes grew moss. Our house, a two-story Victorian with a sagging porch and a cellar...

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The Cedar Ward

I never believed in the quiet places—not until I started working at the Cedar Ward, a state-run psychiatric hospital that had been repurposed from an old tuberculosis sanatorium. The building...

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The Unraveling of the Holloway House

The Holloway house had always been a drafty, creaking old Victorian, but since my stepfather Martin passed from the lung cancer that had hollowed him out, the drafts had become...

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The Swinging Pendulum

The morning light was weak, filtering through the dusty blinds like the last breath of a dying candle. I shuffled into the living room, my feet cold on the cracked...

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The Perpetual Cradle

The day the Hollis family arrived in the dusty town of Red Crick, the air smelled of iron and dry grass. Elias Hollis had inherited a parcel of land from...

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The Static Garden

My grandmother, Elara, had a peculiar habit of planting marigolds in the dead of night. She claimed the moon helped them take root. I never questioned it, not until the...

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The Ledger in the Wall

We’d spent two decades in Nebraska, but when my husband’s job transferred us to the Pacific Northwest, we jumped at the chance. The town was called Stillwater, a name that...

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The Muddy Eddies

At eight, my family traded our cramped city apartment for a dilapidated farmhouse on the edge of the Ozark foothills. The house sagged with age, its porch groaning underfoot, and...

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The Cot at the Foot of the Stairs

My grandmother’s house stood at the end of a dead-end lane in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by pine woods and a fog that rolled in like a tide. I...

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The Nightroom

I was seven when I learned that some rooms are hungry. My brother, Leo, was six, and my sister, Mira, was four. We lived in a rented farmhouse on the...

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