Ghost stories from Missouri

The Milk of Grief

The first time I saw her, I thought it was a trick of the light. The living room was dim, lit only by the soft glow of the floor lamp...

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The Static Between Stations

In the autumn of 1996, I was a junior reporter at a struggling regional paper in the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma. My beat was the forgotten corners of the county—the...

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The Chime in the Wall

In the autumn of 2016, I was living alone in a converted water tower in the hills outside of Weldon. The structure was a cylinder of peeling white paint, its...

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The Weeping Latch

The old farmhouse on Cinder Lane had a way of holding onto things. Dust clung to every surface like a second skin, and the floorboards groaned with the memory of...

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The Crib’s Cold Air

The house had always been drafty, but that autumn, the cold found corners it hadn’t before. I was six months along with our second child, and the old farmhouse outside...

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The Cold Engine

When I was sixteen, a summer job at the county reservoir brought me into the orbit of Dale Kowalski. He was the crew chief, a man of twenty-two with a...

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The Cadence of the Second Floor

The house on Hemlock Lane was a squat, red-brick affair with a sagging porch and a yard that had gone feral. The old woman who’d owned it had been a...

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The Floorboards Remember

In the autumn of 2019, I found myself in the rust-belt town of Northgate, Ohio, staying with my older brother, Dale, and his teenage son, Corey. I had always been...

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The Salt Road

I was sixteen when I crawled out of the second-story window of my stepmother’s house, the screen popping out with a sound like a gunshot in the dead of night....

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The Night the Mailbox Blinked

My family never stayed put for long. Mom called it a ‘hunger for horizons,’ but I think it was a fear of roots digging too deep. At eight, I’d already...

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The Porcelain Ledger

The first day at Denton Middle School felt like stepping onto a foreign planet. I was armed with a new backpack, a fresh haircut, and a desperate need to be...

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The Hollow Hallway

It wasn’t that I was a coward. I’d watched enough horror movies to know that the ones who scream first are the ones who die first, and I prided myself...

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The Unsettled Clock

In the months following our move to the old farmhouse on Thornwood Lane, my wife, Alice, and I began to notice small anomalies. Doors would creak open on their own;...

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The Weight at the Window

It was the summer I turned thirteen, the summer my mother moved us into the old Sandford house on the edge of town. The house was a relic of a...

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The Cinder House

I never believed in ghosts until I moved to the small town of Ashport, a place where the autumn fog clung to the streets like a second skin. My name...

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The Static on the Landing

The morning light clawed through the moth-eaten curtains of my childhood bedroom, painting the wall in sickly yellow stripes. I had been crashing at my aunt’s farmhouse for the past...

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The Static Between Stations

In the autumn of 2004, I was seventeen, living in a two-story house that had once been a railway depot, converted decades ago. My stepfather worked the night shift at...

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The Tin Cross on Route 9

In the autumn of 1954, the farmlands of central Kansas lay flat as a grave marker, and I, a boy of nine, knew every rut in the dirt road that...

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The Pinhole Room

In the autumn of 2012, my fiancé, his father, and our small family caravan rolled into the outskirts of Cedar Falls, a town known for its old mills and even...

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The Ceiling-Tall Visitor

My story begins nine years ago, when I was nineteen and fresh out of a bad breakup. I moved into a tiny studio apartment above a 24-hour laundromat in the...

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The Last Letter from Fort Grafton

In the autumn of my senior year, I was still getting letters from Marcus, my first love, who’d enlisted right after graduation. He wrote from Fort Grafton, a dusty training...

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The Porch Light

It was early October 2015, and I was staying at my aunt’s place in rural Nebraska, helping her sort through boxes in the attic of her old farmhouse. The house...

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The Static Hive

When I first moved into the old carriage house on Maple Street, I dismissed the occasional creaks and rustles as the house settling. The landlord, a wiry old man named...

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