Ghost stories from Nevada

The Feather in the Mire

I’ve always believed that love leaves traces. This is the story of how I found proof of my grandfather’s love in the most unexpected place, and how that proof changed...

Read Story →

The Lantern Keeper

I was sixteen when we moved to the town of Stillwater, a place that seemed to exist only in the spaces between cornfields and forgotten highways. My mother had remarried,...

Read Story →

The Chocolate Offering

The hallway in my grandmother’s old house was never quite straight. It tilted slightly to the left, as if the whole building was leaning away from something. My room was...

Read Story →

Shadows of the New Home

When we relocated to our new place, strange occurrences began to unfold. I share this space with my mother, stepfather, my younger sibling, Lucas, who is 14, and my youngest...

Read Story →

The Last Ember of Winter

The call came on a frostbitten Christmas morning, slicing through the warmth of our Los Angeles apartment like a shard of ice. It was my mother, her voice brittle, telling...

Read Story →

The Cold Room at Crane’s Mill

The day we moved into the old farmhouse on Crane’s Mill Road, the summer heat was suffocating. My stepfather, Marcus, had gotten a job managing the nearby orchard, and the...

Read Story →

The Hollow Step

The house on Birch Lane had a way of holding its breath. I’d noticed it the first week we moved in—a stillness that felt less like peace and more like...

Read Story →

A Night of Unexpected Sounds

It was a quiet morning in the small town of Maplewood when Lily found herself home alone. Her father had left for work early, and her younger sister was already...

Read Story →

The Veil of Feasting

Marta had lived in the crumbling three-story building on Denmore Street for nearly a decade. The walls were thin, the radiators clanked, and the neighbors changed like seasons. But the...

Read Story →

The Cartographer’s Compass

Ever since I could remember, the dreams had been my constant companions. They came to me as a child, vivid and unsettling, showing me moments that hadn’t yet happened. A...

Read Story →

Finding Love in Unlikely Places

From a young age, Clara felt different. She noticed things others didn’t, like fleeting glimpses of the future and feelings that guided her choices. These moments, often cryptic, seemed to...

Read Story →

The Box Beneath the Crib

In November of 2004, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of an old building in a city I’d never visited. I was twenty-two, and my daughter,...

Read Story →

The Lantern in the Pines

On the last night of December, when the air bit with frost and the sky hung like a shroud, I was nine, bundled in flannel, staring out the attic window...

Read Story →

The Frequency of Stillness

At 32, Marcus had grown accustomed to the night terrors that plagued his sleep. They began when he was nine, in the creaking farmhouse his family rented on the outskirts...

Read Story →

The Blind’s Lunge

In the sweltering July of 2006, my cousin Damon and I were entrenched in a marathon session of Oblivion at our aunt’s farmhouse in rural Kansas. The house was a...

Read Story →

The Draft Under the Door

When I was a kid, we lived in a crumbling farmhouse at the edge of a town that had given up on itself. The house had these massive, drafty rooms...

Read Story →

The Seamstress of the Second Floor

I was nine when I first saw the woman in the window, and I’ve spent the better part of my life trying to unsee her. It was the autumn of...

Read Story →

The Salt and Iron Bargain

For seven years, the hag had haunted my nights. Not the wispy, weeping kind of specter, but a solid, crushing presence that pressed the breath from my lungs and filled...

Read Story →

The Lady in the Crawlspace

In the autumn of 2002, I found myself in the remote mining town of Purgatory Flats, Nevada, working at the Silver Sage, a former saloon turned brothel. The place had...

Read Story →

The Glass Chime

The wind had been howling for two days straight across the high desert, a dry, relentless blast that rattled the juniper branches and sent tumbleweeds careening past the windows of...

Read Story →

The Mirror Porch’s Promise

I was fourteen when we moved into the old farmhouse at the edge of the salt flats, a place where the air tasted of rust and the horizon shimmered with...

Read Story →

The Plastic Pine

In the autumn of 2009, my wife Clara and I moved into a drafty Victorian house in upstate New York. We had little money, so we furnished it with thrift-store...

Read Story →

The Uninvited Guest of Ward 4

In the quiet coastal town of Marrow’s Point, the old lighthouse had been converted into a bed-and-breakfast, but it was the adjacent cottage that drew me through my childhood. My...

Read Story →

The Saltwater Communion

In the summer of 2008, I was a twelve-year-old who believed the supernatural was the stuff of cheap horror films and gullible minds. My father, a marine engineer, had just...

Read Story →