Ghost stories from New Jersey

The Lace-Collar Specter

The incident occurred not in my living room, but in the old conservatory of our inherited manor, a glass-and-iron annex grafted onto the east wing like a tumor. I was...

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The Laser’s Last Stand

I’ve never considered myself a believer in the paranormal. I’ve always clung to logic, to the scientific method, to the idea that every mystery has a rational explanation if you...

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The Charred Threshold

My grandmother’s house was a gaunt, soot-stained Victorian at the end of a gravel road in the pine barrens of South Jersey. The town called it the old Sorrow House,...

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The Last Thing He Saw

The farmhouse sat at the end of a gravel road, a quarter mile from the nearest neighbor. For as long as I could remember, a heavy gray mastiff named Brutus...

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The Frequency of Static

My name is Marcus, and I’m 41, living in a converted lighthouse on the foggy coast of Maine. For years, I worked as a sound engineer, but after a divorce...

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The Underpass Keeper

I was nine when the flood came to Millbrook, a town that had no business having floods, sitting as it did on a dry plateau above the river. We lived...

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The Tolling of the Iron Bell

I never believed in the old stories about the Harlow estate. The crumbling Victorian mansion sat at the edge of our small town, a skeletal silhouette against the pine barrens....

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The Last Crayon

Every house has its own quiet language, a creak in the stairway, a draft under the door, a pattern of light that slips across the wall at dusk. The house...

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The Pillow’s Secret

I never thought much of the old farmhouse when I moved in. It was cheap, isolated, and the landlord was desperate to rent it out, but the peeling wallpaper and...

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The Keys in the Drain

The last ferry from the mainland had coughed its way into the harbor at 9:47, and by ten, the fog had rolled in off the strait like a wet blanket....

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The Clockwork Hum

The summer we moved into Aunt Hester’s house, I was six and my sister, Clara, was eight. Our parents had to spend the summer in Switzerland for work, so we...

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The Quarry’s Pulse

I’ve lived above the old Gable’s Quarry office for eight years now, ever since my partner, Dan, and I moved into the converted loft above the shuttered stone-cutting business. The...

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The Circular Clearing

The drive up to the Ridgecrest Hermitage was longer than I remembered, the dirt road narrowing as the pines closed in like tall, silent sentinels. The group that gathered there,...

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The Lantern in the Pines

I hadn’t been walking the path long, but the pines around me had grown so thick that the last trace of the gravel road vanished behind a wall of needles....

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The Hollow Wall

For three weeks, Lena had been seeing things. Not full shapes, just flickers at the edge of her vision, like the tail of a rat slipping behind a baseboard or...

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The Coil in the Loam

Marta, a 29-year-old wildlife illustrator, had just moved into a converted watermill on the edge of the Cranberry Glades in West Virginia. The mill had been gutted and modernized, but...

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The Pacing in the Pine

Our new house in the Cascade foothills was a post-and-beam relic from the seventies, all cedar and glass, built to face the silent forest. We moved in just as the...

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The Hushing Mannequin

That autumn, my family moved to a quiet cul-de-sac in the outskirts of Millbrook, a town known for its pumpkin patches and overly friendly neighbors. My mom, trying to make...

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The Light That Fell

In the autumn of 1994, the year I turned eight, my family moved into a sprawling Victorian house on the outskirts of a small town called Marrow’s Bend. The house...

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The Red Beads of St. Agatha

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. I was a skeptic, a rationalist, someone who chalked up every bump in the night to old pipes or a creaky floorboard. That...

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The Iron Tally

The summer the swamp breathed, my cousin Marcus came to stay with us. We were both fifteen, and my older sister Lena, seventeen, acted like our reluctant den mother. Our...

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The Last Planchette

My name is Mara, and for as long as I can remember, the dead have been a fascination. Not in a morbid way, but in the way that a locked...

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The Seventh Floor

I was nine when we moved into the Meridian, a crumbling pre-war building on the edge of the industrial district. The walls were thick, the radiators clanked like bones, and...

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The Reek of Rotting Lilies

My family moved to Pine Hollow when I was seven, a town carved from a throat of dark pines. Our house was a two-story Victorian with a wraparound porch, but...

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