Ghost stories from Nebraska

The Yellow Paper Lanterns

The call came at 9:47 PM, a Tuesday. I was in the middle of packing a suitcase for a conference I had no intention of attending. My wife, Nora, was...

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The Salt of the Earth

My name is Elara, and I know it’s been a year since I vanished from the forum, but I have a very good reason. If you remember, I’d picked up,...

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The Wandering Hum

I’ve never been one to scare easy. Fifteen years in the state penitentiary, most of them in the segregation wing, will do that to you. You learn to read the...

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The Salt Cracks

Maya and I had been living in the basement apartment for eight months, the kind of place where the walls sweat cold and the landlord’s old boiler clanked like a...

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The Granite Archives

I’ve been running fiber lines through the city for twenty years, and in all that time, I’ve learned that the oldest buildings have the thickest walls and the heaviest secrets....

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The Grafting Season

The letter arrived on a Tuesday, tucked between a gas bill and a seed catalog. My sister, Lena, had never been one for correspondence, so the sight of her cramped...

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The Third Bootprint

The old service road snaked through the pine barrens like a scar, and my rusted-out hatchback, Gertie, coughed as I guided her along the ruts. I’d been a field technician...

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The Step That Crunches

It started on a Tuesday, two days after I checked out of that godforsaken motel on the edge of the salt flats. I had driven six hours straight to get...

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The Last Sycamore

The funeral of Eleanor Voss was held at the Old Sycamore Chapel, a whitewashed building that leaned like a tired old man, its roof sagging under the weight of decades...

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The Hat on the Gable

The autumn air had that crisp, pre-Halloween bite, and we were all crammed into the narrow backyard of Marcus’s house, the fence looming like a picket of ribs against the...

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The Last Grease of the Oubliette

It began, not with a scream, but with a smell. Not the usual ozone of dying electronics or the sour tang of old toner, but something deeper, older, like the...

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The Pilot’s Lullaby

The first time it happened, I was nine, in the autumn of 1994. Our house was a drafty Victorian on the edge of a town that time forgot, and the...

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The Weight of the Key

My husband, Arthur, has a habit of collecting old keys. Not in a decorative way, like some people hang them on walls, but in a secretive way, like he’s hoarding...

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The Granary of Unfinished Things

The old granary stood at the edge of my grandfather’s farm, its tin roof rusted and sagging, its wooden walls bleached gray by decades of sun and snow. I hadn’t...

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The Empty Swing Set

The day we moved into the farmhouse on Cedar Hollow Road, the realtor made a point of mentioning the swing set in the backyard. ‘Been there since the eighties,’ she...

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The Constant Thrum of the Loom

I’ve spent most of my life with my hands buried in soil and my eyes on the horizon, but my real work happens in the quiet spaces between heartbeats. People...

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The Last Garden

The pine resin on my fingers smelled of Christmas, but the memory was sharper: the taste of ozone before a storm, the weight of a child’s hand in mine. I...

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The Amber Light of Room Six

When I was seven, we moved into a sprawling Victorian house on the edge of a fading mill town called Raven’s Hollow. The town itself was a skeleton of what...

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The Ceiling Walker

In the autumn of 2018, my daughter Lily started kindergarten. She was a bright, imaginative child, always chattering about her imaginary friends. At first, it was endearing. But then the...

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The Last Delivery

I’ve always believed in the unseen, but until I moved into the old brick building on Harbor Street, I’d never been forced to live with it. My name is Elara,...

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The Muddy Boots

I remember trudging up the gravel path to our farmhouse after a late autumn soccer practice. The sky was a bruised purple, and the air smelled of wet leaves and...

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The Shape of a Missing Thing

My grandmother’s house sat on a plot of land that had been in our family for generations, but the house itself was modern, built by my great-uncle in the seventies....

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The Salt and the Static

Three years after we moved into the creaking colonial on Birch Lane, my mother finally broke her silence. We were sitting in the new house’s sunroom, the one with the...

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The Understage Gap

The old Opera House had been converted into a school auditorium decades ago, but it still smelled of dust, aged wood, and lingering cologne from forgotten performances. Our drama teacher,...

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