Ghost stories from New Jersey

The Secrets of the Old Lodge

During my high school years, I spent my summers working at an old mountain lodge. Initially, I tried various tasks, but I eventually found my place in a themed maze...

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The Empty Carousel

Two summers ago, I worked the night shift at the abandoned amusement park on the edge of our town. The park, once a bustling seaside attraction called ‘Coral Pier,’ had...

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The Bandana’s Knot

In the summer of my junior year, I found work at the Gull’s Caw Amusement Pier, a sprawling wooden labyrinth of rides and games that had seen better decades. My...

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The Night Visitor

When Clara was just a child, her grandmother often shared tales that lingered in her mind. One story, in particular, left a mark on her heart. It began a week...

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The Pale Boy of Lunar House

Mara was six, the youngest of four sisters, and the undeniable favorite of her grandfather, Old Man Harrow. He had a way of making her feel like the center of...

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The Last Lantern on Hemlock Road

In the autumn of her fifth year, Elara woke to the smell of damp earth and old pennies. The house on Hemlock Road had been her grandmother’s, and now, after...

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The Indentation

I’m writing this down not because I think anyone will believe me, but because I need to know if anyone else has felt it—the weight of nothing pressing into the...

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The Open Door’s Patient

For years, I have slept with my bedroom door shut. It’s a small ritual, a lock against the unknown, a habit born of a childhood fear that never quite loosened...

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The Hollow Ground

The house my grandfather built stood on a plot of land that had once been nothing but a ruined barn and its collapsed stone cellar. He had the barn torn...

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The Unburdening of Elias Thorne

The old farmhouse had settled into its nightly creaks and groans, a symphony Elias Thorne had grown accustomed to. Tonight, however, the familiar symphony was overlaid with a silence that...

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The Stillness Before Dawn

I had read about the phenomenon in a magazine, so when it happened to me, I recognized it at once. It was not the terror I had imagined, but a...

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The Floorboards Remember

Mara had always been a light sleeper, but the house she inherited from her grandmother seemed to amplify every creak and groan. It was a sprawling Victorian relic, wrapped in...

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The Odor of Static

The day they cut the tumor from beneath my tongue, I felt a strange kinship with the fish in the market—gasping, flopping, desperate for air that wouldn’t come. The surgery...

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The Price of Apples

I was fifteen that summer, and my world revolved around the corner store, the public pool, and the three dollars an hour I made watching the Calloway kids. The Calloways...

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The Long Road Home

I’ve always been a skeptic, but working as a long-haul trucker for twenty years changes a person. You see things on those empty stretches of highway that defy logic. I’d...

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The Settling Dust

The old farmhouse had been silent for years, ever since the last log. I kept the place because land was cheap and the quiet suited me. Then came Maria, the...

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The Hollow at the Root

Arden lived in a converted grain silo on the edge of a fallow cornfield, a solitary cylinder of rust-streaked metal that caught the wind like a tuning fork. For three...

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The Palms of the Hollow

In the autumn of my thirteenth year, my family moved to the town of Harrow Creek, a place where the leaves never seemed to fall entirely, and the air always...

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The Salt and the Rust

In the damp autumn of 2018, I was staying with my cousin, Lena, in her dilapidated Victorian house perched on the edge of a fog-choked valley. The house, named ‘The...

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The Game We Never Finished

I still get a chill when I see a checkers board. It’s not the game itself, but what it represents: the night we opened a door we should have left...

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The Silhouette of Dried Corn

I’ve carried this with me for forty years, and the internet hasn’t given me a single answer, only a few others who’ve seen something similar and then gone quiet. It...

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The Plaster Saint

Nadia had always been a light sleeper, but the paralysis came like a sudden tide, pulling her under while she was still awake. She lay in her childhood bedroom, the...

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The Oscillating Hum

I never thought much about the fan. It was just a gray metal box on a stand, its blades churning the stale air of my bedroom into a lukewarm breeze....

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The Cornfield Saint

My family moved to Cedar Hollow when I was five, into a development that had sprouted overnight from fields that had been fallow for decades. The houses were all alike,...

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