Ghost stories from New Hampshire

The Ragged Man on the Staircase

I was eleven, maybe twelve, when the house on Parchman Lane started to feel wrong. It wasn’t the peeling wallpaper or the draft that smelled of apples and rot. It...

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The Spinning Room Chime

My husband, Daniel, works the night shift as the facility supervisor at the old Meridian Complex, a sprawling brick behemoth that has loomed over the town of Ashford since 1887....

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The Loom’s Lament

The air in the weaving room hung thick with the ghosts of a century of cotton dust. At 11 PM it was still, the enormous looms standing like silent, rusted...

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The Corn Road

Mara had always been a light sleeper, but this was different. For the past month, she’d been waking at the same ungodly hour—3:00 AM, sometimes a few minutes before or...

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The Granary’s Second Tenant

I moved into the old granary loft at the edge of Millford in mid-May. The building had been converted from a 1920s grain storage facility, and the landlord boasted about...

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The Tattered Man at the Crossing

The summer of 1954 in the mill town of Ashford Hollow was thick with humidity and the smell of creosote from the railway ties. My great-aunt, Margaret, lived in a...

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The Ledger in the Subfloor

The summer I turned thirteen, my family moved from the dry suburbs of Fresno to the damp, moss-covered town of Hollis, Vermont. Our new home was a sprawling, decaying Victorian...

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The Salt-Crusted Knife

I was nine when we moved to the coastal town of Duncrag, into a house that leaned into the wind like a drunkard. The previous owners had left in a...

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The Unseen Caller

The rust-colored leaves of late October skittered across the cracked asphalt of the cul-de-sac, but inside our modest two-story house on Maplewood Drive, the air was thick with the scent...

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The Recurrent Aberration

Marla moved into the converted farmhouse on the edge of Cinder Hollow seeking quiet solitude. The previous tenant had left in a hurry, leaving behind old furniture, dusty bookshelves, and...

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The Static Between Floors

Our new apartment on Maple Street had a strange hum, a low-frequency thrum that vibrated through the floorboards like a forgotten appliance. My brother, Leo, and I noticed it the...

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The Bent Nails

The summer solstice brought a heat wave that made the air thick and syrupy, even inside the old farmhouse on the edge of the Morrow property. I was home alone,...

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The Amber Hallway

The old farmhouse sat at the end of a gravel lane, a mile from the nearest paved road. We’d rented it in late October, hoping for a quiet place to...

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The Salt Road

I was eleven the summer we moved to the old Millbrook house, a dilapidated Victorian on the edge of a dying New England town. The place was a skeleton of...

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The Porch Light Keeper

My grandfather, Harold, was a carpenter with a laugh like a thunderclap and a fondness for practical jokes. For decades, he worked on houses across the county, but the old...

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The Charnel Beam

In the autumn of 1994, my wife, Elena, and I moved into a two-bedroom flat above a shuttered bakery in the old quarter of Grimsby, a town that seemed to...

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The Static in the Walls

In October 2019, my wife and I bought a sprawling Victorian house in the hills of Vermont, surrounded by a dense forest of old pines. The place had been vacant...

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The Pale Observer at the Dockside Window

The summer I turned nine, my parents split, and my mother, my brother Leo, and I moved into a cramped apartment above a vacant fish cannery on the pier. The...

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The Ragged Stitcher

The house on Bramblewick Lane was a Victorian relic, its bones creaking under layers of peeling wallpaper and decades of dust. My boyfriend, Leo, and I had moved into the...

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The Linen Closet Visitor

The house on Maple Street had always felt a little crowded, even though it was just me, my two cats, and the occasional creak of old floorboards. My calico, Patches,...

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The Salt Line

I never believed in the devil. Ghosts, maybe, in a vague, let’s-not-think-too-hard-about-it way. But demons, possession, that was Hollywood nonsense. Then I met Elias, and I spent a night in...

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Clockwork in the Attic

At sixteen, I thought I understood fear: the cold sweat before a test, the dread of a bully’s fist, the bite of a Chicago winter. But that spring break, I...

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The Cigar Ash on the Windowsill

My family and I rented a small lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota last September. The cabin, called ‘The Pines,’ was modern, with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a dark, still lake. The...

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The Cartographer’s Ledger

In the spring of 2011, I took a position at Halden & Vine, a small cartography firm nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The company occupied a...

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