Ghost stories from Nevada

The Ankle Grip

My sister Clara passed away in the autumn of 2021, after a long illness. I grieved, but life moved on. Then, about a month after her death, I had a...

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The Mannequin in Aisle Four

I spent nearly five years working the sales floor at ‘Sahara & Sage’, a sprawling boutique perched on the edge of the old Reno arcade district, facing the shimmering fake...

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The Curator of the Drowned Galleries

The Museum of Maritime Antiquities closed its doors to the public at 6 PM, but the night crew didn’t arrive until 9. For months, the overnight security and cleaners had...

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The Gilded Mannequin

I’ve been a night janitor at the Meadowbrook Mall for six years now, and I’ve seen plenty of strange things. But the last three months have been something else entirely....

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The Flapping Page

I never believed in ghosts until the autumn of 2019, when my colleague, Miriam, dragged me to the annual Harvest Howl at the old Crayton Fairgrounds. The fairgrounds had been...

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The Weeping Alphabet

When I was thirteen, I could feel the dead like static in the air. My grandmother called it the ‘gift,’ but it felt more like a curse, a constant low...

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The Marigold Mannequin

It was the autumn of my tenth year, and the town of Kettle Springs had thrown its annual Harvest Fair on the grounds of the old Millbrook Elementary. My father,...

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The Last Cradle

My mother has never been one for ghost stories. She’s a practical woman, a retired nurse with steady hands and a habit of checking the locks twice. But ask her...

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The Grease Trap Waltz

I’ve always had a knack for seeing things that aren’t there. Not in a creepy, horror-movie way, but more like a persistent, annoying flicker at the edge of your vision....

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The Drowsy Page

I was eight when the malaise took hold, or perhaps nine—memory is a fog around those days. We lived in a rented cottage on the edge of the Paskagama bog,...

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The Crawl Space Directive

In the autumn of 1972, our family occupied a cramped third-floor flat in the Meridian Estates, a decaying housing project that smelled perpetually of cabbage and despair. I was seven,...

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The Gray Flicker

I work the night shift at the Meridian Data Archive, a vast, windowless building where we process insurance claims. It’s not glamorous, but it’s quiet, and I’ve always liked the...

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The Iron Chisel

After the séance at Mira’s house, I thought we’d closed the book on the black glob. But when she asked me to help her cleanse her new apartment, I felt...

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The Counting Thing

I was thirteen when we moved to the edge of the Thornwood, a vast stretch of pine and scrub that swallowed the horizon. Our house was a converted ranger station,...

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The Viscous Visitor

I moved back into my childhood home in the quiet suburb of Maplewood last month, after my apartment lease ended unexpectedly. The house had always felt a bit off, but...

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The Salted Gate

In the autumn of 1984, my friend Delia and I found ourselves in the outskirts of Reno, Nevada, chasing the tail end of a road trip that had lost its...

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The Red Bowl

The assignment came through on a Tuesday, a sudden need for me to audit a remote branch of the company in the northern part of the state. I’d be gone...

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The Loam Behind the Wall

Marta first noticed the smell in late October, a damp, fungal odor curling from the baseboards of her new apartment. She dismissed it as old building musk, but it lingered,...

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The Cattail Gate

It was the summer of ’99 when my family landed in the dusty outskirts of Prescott, Arizona, after my stepfather scored a maintenance gig at the new Sunstone Ridge complex....

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The Dark Between the Cracks

I was twelve when we moved to Dry Springs, a town that seemed to have been scraped out of the desert and left to wither. Dust devils danced along the...

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The Salt Flats Motel

In the autumn of 1975, when I was barely five years old, my family became lost in the vast, unbroken expanse of Nevada. We had left my great-aunt’s house in...

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The Cedar Box

In the autumn of 2003, I was forty-five, recently divorced, and desperate for a place to call my own. I’d moved to the small town of Millbrook a year earlier,...

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The Bone Wind

Elara had always felt a strange kinship with the wind that howled through the hollows of her family’s new home, a rambling Victorian perched on the edge of a dying...

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The Occupant of 3318

In the autumn of 2018, I had to attend a week-long logistics conference in the sprawling business district of Cedar Falls, Iowa. I booked a room at the Summit Plaza...

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