Ghost stories from New Jersey

The Dispatcher’s Call

I’ve been staying with my aunt in her old farmhouse for the past few months, trying to get back on my feet. The place is drafty and the stairs creak,...

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The Ring of Rust

The apartment sat atop an old cannery, its windows fogged with salt and time. My friend Lena had inherited the place from her grandmother, who had lived there for forty...

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The Widow’s Itch

I’ve never told anyone about the winters I spent in that rented room above the closed-down cannery in Millbrook, Ohio. It was the fall of 1981, and I was seventeen,...

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The Last Floorboard

In the winter of 2019, after my husband’s funeral, I moved into a creaking Victorian house on the edge of a forgotten forest. The house had been in my family...

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The Lantern’s Constant Vigil

The year was 1972 when we moved into the apartment above the old packing shed. My husband’s new job managing the rose nursery came with a place to live, a...

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The Salt Harvest

In the coastal town of Ashgrove, the salt marshes stretch for miles, their silvered pools reflecting a sky that never seems to clear. My name is Mara, and I’ve spent...

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The Weeping Wall

When I was fourteen, my father and I finally stopped running. After years of cramped apartments and drafty rentals, he’d saved enough for a real house—a two-story Victorian in the...

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The Weight of Unblinking Eyes

Ever since I was a child, a persistent sensation of being watched had clung to me like a second skin. It wasn’t the casual glance of a stranger; it was...

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The Dried Juniper Casket

Elara and I had always been drawn to the forbidden. In the dusty attic of my grandmother’s abandoned farmhouse, we found it: a hand-carved wooden box, the lid etched with...

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The Painted Window

The moment I stepped onto the second-floor landing of the old brick walk-up, a chill settled in my bones. It wasn’t the November air; it was something else, a heaviness...

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The Layers Beneath

The cardboard box was the color of a stale biscuit, its tape peeling like old skin. As I dragged it into the narrow hallway of our new flat, I didn’t...

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The Ceramic Smile

I was eleven, living with my grandmother in the dusty outskirts of El Paso, when the dream came to me. It was a dry summer, the kind that turns the...

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The Crate in the Attic

The summer of 1998, I was seven, and my cousin Lena had come to stay with us while her parents sorted out a nasty divorce. Our house was a creaky...

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The Girl in the Yellow Dress

I had always been skeptical of my great-aunt Margot’s tales about her old house in the hills of Vermont. She claimed it was haunted by the spirits of a family...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

I never believed in the weight of a name until I inherited one. My great-aunt Marguerite, a woman I’d met maybe twice in my life, left me a small cottage...

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The Red Door

I was twenty-six when my marriage fell apart, and my two daughters and I moved into my mother’s cramped bungalow on the edge of a dying mill town. The house...

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The Scent of Pears

For forty-three years, I had been a man of logic. I taught physics at a small community college in the high desert of Nevada, where the dry air and endless...

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The Red-Eyed Cartographer

Mara had always prided herself on her logical mind. As an archivist at the Meridian County Historical Society, she dealt in facts, dates, and verifiable truths. But for the past...

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The Girl Who Walked Through Walls

My grandmother left us a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, a place she’d inherited from her own parents, who had built it in the 1930s. We moved in after...

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The Chalkboard’s Grudge

In the winter of my sophomore year, the halls of Westbrook High felt like a mausoleum after the final bell. My friend Marcus and I often lingered, trading half-hearted jokes...

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The Cigar Smoke of Signor Bellini

In the quiet outskirts of a town that wasn’t quite a town, we lived in a ground-floor apartment in a building that had seen better decades. The walls were thin,...

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The Frosted Glass

It was the third week of January, and the old farmhouse on Maple Hollow Road had finally settled into its winter silence. The snow outside had piled up against the...

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The Leaf-Buried Hour

October 30, 1988. I was seventeen, and I had a rule about guys: the older, the better. That’s how I ended up with Cole, a twenty-year-old ex-Marine who smelled like...

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