Ghost stories from Missouri

The Weight of Unspoken Shame

Mara had always been sensitive to the unseen, a gift she’d inherited from her Aunt Delia, who had passed away two years ago, leaving behind a small, carved jade pendant...

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The Lathe of Heredity

I took the job in early March, a traveling gig for a print logistics firm that had me crisscrossing the drought-stricken flats of western Kansas. The pay was modest, but...

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The Mulch Pile

The October air had a bite to it, the kind that made you pull your jacket tight and wish for a fire. I was hauling a bag of compost to...

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The Last Comb

In the autumn of 2015, I was living in a small, cedar-shingled house at the edge of a town that had a name but no identity. My mother, Elinor, had...

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The Asphalt Requiem

The rusted sign for ‘Prairie View Estates’ leaned like a tired old man, its letters barely legible against the setting sun. I’d come here on a whim, chasing a ghost...

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The Salt in the Walls

I never believed in ghosts, not really. But when my best friend, Maya, told me about the house she’d just moved into, something in her voice made me shiver. It...

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The Lantern’s Vigil

It was the winter of my eleventh year that my older brother, Julian, fell ill. A fever had taken hold of him, turning his skin to parchment and his breath...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Ledger

The truck’s headlights carved a weak yellow wedge out of the darkness, revealing rows of tilted headstones that seemed to lean toward us like curious spectators. My cousin, Elena, was...

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The Stillborn Requiem

In the autumn of my twelfth year, our family moved into the old Harbinger House, a sprawling Victorian relic that had stood empty for decades. My room was in the...

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The Lantern in the Root Cellar

I never believed that the dead could linger, not truly. I was nineteen, living in my grandmother’s old farmhouse after she passed, and I had converted the root cellar into...

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The Weight of the Landing

The house on Cutter’s Lane had been in our family for less than two years, but it already felt like it had secrets woven into its bones. I was twelve...

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The Sealed Corner

In 2016, I inherited a small craftsman bungalow in the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, from my great-aunt Marguerite. It was a quaint place with a deep, unfinished basement that smelled...

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The Orchard of Flesh

I’ve always been able to feel things others can’t. Not in a dramatic way, but like a constant hum under the surface—a buzz of unease when someone lies, a cold...

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The Blue Ribbon

It was a humid August afternoon in 2018 when I first saw the dog. I was living in a rented cottage on the edge of a town called Merrow, a...

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The Lantern Code

The first time Cora saw them, she was seven, sitting on the cracked linoleum floor of her grandmother’s kitchen while a pot of chillis simmered on the stove. A tiny,...

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The Static in the Walls

The house on Cedar Lane was a monument to ordinary life, a split-level with beige siding and a two-car garage, built in the late seventies when optimism ran on cheap...

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The Ironwood Incident

I was four, maybe five, when I first saw the thing in the ironwood tree. My name is Elias, and this is the only memory I have of that age...

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The Burn Mark

The old farmhouse had been in Elena’s family for generations, but it had always carried a weight that pressed against the walls, as if the timber remembered things better left...

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The Static in the Walls

The trouble began on a Tuesday, late February, in the cramped attic bedroom of the old Harrington house. Marcus was sprawled on his stomach, controller in hand, absorbed in a...

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The Stitched Man in the Hall

When I was five, my mother and I rented the ground floor of a crumbling Victorian house on the edge of a dying Wisconsin town called Harrow Creek. The house...

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The Brass Taste

In the sweltering summer of my twenty-third year, I moved from the clatter of the city to the quiet, dust-choked town of Parma Falls. It was a place of peeling...

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The Latch on the Linen Press

I’d always felt a certain reverence for the old house on Amber Lane, the one with the crooked porch and the windows that seemed to follow you down the street....

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The Locked Cellar Door

We’d been in the old Sandford place for about four months, ever since our previous landlady, Mrs. Gable, passed and her nephew offered us the house at a steal. It...

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The Perfume of Dried Roses

It began on a Tuesday in late February, in the old farmhouse my grandmother left me. The place had been in the family for generations, creaking with memories and the...

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