Ghost stories from Montana

The Gift of the Fevered Moon

I wasn’t born here, but my grandmother was, and her grandmother before her, back when the land was still raw with the memory of the old ways. The reservation I...

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The Dirt Mound and the Caged Dogs

Our cul-de-sac, Willow Bend, was carved into the edge of Larkin County nine years ago, a perfect horseshoe of twelve identical two-story homes, each with a manicured lawn and a...

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The Hung Hide

The first time I noticed it, I thought a cricket had gotten trapped behind the picture frame. But the sound wasn’t coming from the frame; it was coming from the...

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The Cradle of Stone

The house sat at the end of a gravel road in the high desert of New Mexico, a crumbling adobe hacienda that had once been a way station for travelers...

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The Fourth Presence

I had just returned from the mill, my bones aching with the day’s labor. I collapsed into the worn leather armchair in our apartment, the one that smelled of old...

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The Silent Jogger

My house on Maple Street was a picture of perfection, with its white picket fence and rose bushes that bloomed in wild pinks and reds. The neighbors called it ‘the...

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The Winter Tenant

The winter I turned eight, we spent Christmas at my great-aunt Mabel’s farmhouse, a rambling Victorian that had been in the family for generations. My parents, my older brother Ethan,...

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The Thermometer Cracks

In the late autumn of 1987, my father, a long-haul trucker named Dale, was hauling a load of frozen poultry from a processing plant in Boise to a distributor in...

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The Carved Comfort

When I was six, my family moved into a crumbling farmhouse on the edge of the Thornwood, a place where the trees grew so close they seemed to swallow the...

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The Iron Lung Room

The night air was crisp and carried the scent of pine and distant rain. I zipped my jacket against the chill, my breath visible in the glow of the streetlights...

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The Locked Ward

My earliest memory is of the smell of mothballs and something else, something sweet and wrong, like rotting flowers. That was the scent of the Greenhollow Rest Home, where my...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

I never thought I’d be writing this down, but the events of the past few months have left me no choice. My name is Elara, and I’ve always been what...

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The Last Gate

On a humid evening in late August, I was perched on a rickety stool inside the visitor kiosk at the Old Mill Ruins, a pioneer settlement reconstructed along the banks...

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The Refrigerated Air

Marcus had always been drawn to old buildings, their creaking floors and peeling paint whispering secrets of the past. When he took a janitorial job at the Harlan County Training...

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The Ink That Breathes

Four years ago, I visited my friend Derek in the town of Blackwood Falls. They had just moved into a sprawling Victorian manor perched atop a hill, its eaves dripping...

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The Hollow Static

I’ve lived with the unseen my whole life. Cold spots, flickering lights, the occasional whisper of a name I never knew—they were as common to me as the hum of...

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The Glassblower’s Reckoning

The summer I turned nine, my parents dragged me to the foothills of the Umbrian mountains to visit my great-aunt Rosalba. She was a recluse who lived in a crumbling...

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The Tenant Who Left No Trace

Three years ago, I made the decision to uproot my life and return to the small town of Millbrook, nestled in the foothills of the Cascades. I had abandoned my...

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The Haunting of Willow Lane

On a bleak and frosty evening, I made my way home after a gathering, taking a long path through the woods. Along the way stood an ancient structure known to...

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The Fifth Step

The night air was thick with the smell of wet asphalt and rotting leaves. I was trudging home from a house party in the industrial district, a place of shuttered...

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The Pen That Fell Twice

Six months ago, I was a sophomore at Ashford Academy, a boarding school nestled in the hills of Vermont. I’d been there since sixth grade, and the old dormitory, Meriwether...

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The Humming Circuit

I had come to the clapboard house on the edge of the marsh to housesit for my aunt, who had inherited the place from a reclusive great-uncle. The house had...

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The Salt Wife

My grandmother used to say that the old Kestrel house was built on a dead man’s bones. She meant it literally, though no one believed her until the salt started...

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The Dime in the Dust

In the summer of 1994, when I was six, my father took me to visit his older brother, Uncle Ray, who lived in a ramshackle farmhouse on the outskirts of...

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