Ghost stories from New York

The Bone Gate

The first thing I noticed was the cold. Not the sharp bite of autumn, but a damp, cellar chill that seemed to seep from the walls themselves. I was seventeen,...

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The Lantern Room

I never told anyone about what happened that summer at my aunt’s lighthouse cottage. It wasn’t my aunt’s, really; it was a friend of the family who let us stay...

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The Thermostat’s Guest

The house on Maple Street had always been a bit odd, but never frightening. When my partner, Lena, and I moved in, we joked that the plumbing had a personality...

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The Attic’s Ledger

My grandmother’s house, a sprawling Victorian in the heart of Ohio, was a museum of the dead. Every surface, every corner, held a relic from a bygone era. The heavy...

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The Weft and the Warp

The summer I turned sixteen, my cousin Lila and I spent our days in my grandmother’s defunct weaving mill, which she’d converted into an apartment. The mill’s machinery had long...

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The Creeper in the Garden

I had spent eleven years of my life in that house on Hemlock Lane, the one with the peeling paint and the porch that groaned underfoot like a tired animal....

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The Hollow Twin

In the autumn of my eleventh year, I buried my imaginary friends in the backyard of our rented house on Cedar Lane. Cloey, Allison, and Andrew—each a facet of my...

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The Basement of Olive Street

In the autumn of 2001, Margaret and I had just moved into a converted Victorian house on Olive Street in a sleepy town in upstate New York. The house was...

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The Salad Bar Specter

I remember the night it all started with a chill that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. My friend Jenna had invited me over for a sleepover, and...

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The Static in the Walls

I’ve always prided myself on being a rational person. So when my neighbor, Clara, offered to look after my house and my two elderly cats while I visited my sister...

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The Salt Line

The day we moved into the house on Hemlock Hill, the lockbox was already rusted, and the realtor’s key snapped off in the deadbolt. I had to jimmy the thing...

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The Grip of the Unseen

My grandmother always said the woods remembered. That they kept the bones of every mistake, every secret buried under moss and root. I used to think she was just being...

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The Porcelain Doll

When I was sixteen, my family lived in an old farmhouse at the end of a long gravel road. The house had been in my mother’s family for generations, and...

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The Loom of the Drowned Orchard

I grew up in the arid folds of Arizona, where the sun bleached the world to bone and the only ghosts were the heat shimmers that danced on the asphalt....

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The Constant Companion

I was sixteen when I first felt it—a presence just behind my left shoulder, like a breath on my neck that never came. It wasn’t scary then, just a curiosity....

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The Ash Bell

My father rarely spoke of his childhood, but when he did, it was usually about the old house on Maple Hollow Road—a place that seemed to collect silence like dust....

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The Hollow Door

We moved into the old farmhouse in the autumn of 2021, drawn by the price and the promise of land for our horses. The structure itself was a defiant skeleton...

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The Salt and Iron Man

In the autumn of 1984, I worked the graveyard shift at a small 24-hour laundromat called Suds & Cycle, tucked into the ground floor of a crumbling brownstone in the...

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The Midnight Warden

I was seven when it first came to me, in the old farmhouse on the outskirts of Larkspur Hollow. The house creaked and groaned like an old man, and the...

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The Static Hum

My grandfather’s farmhouse had a rhythm to it—the creak of the porch swing, the mutter of the old generator, and the ever-present hum of the deep well pump that fed...

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The Lantern Keeper

I am a first-generation American, raised on the vivid, hair-raising tales my grandmother spun from the old country. But I never thought I’d have a story of my own until...

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The Lamplighter’s Bargain

The old Hillman house had always been a fixture in our small town, a sprawling Victorian that had seen better days before we moved in. It sat at the end...

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The Lantern Code

I’ve always been a rational person, a retired engineer who trusts in mechanics and physics. But what happened in the autumn of 2019 in our newly acquired cottage in the...

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The Drowned Lantern

My earliest memory of the lake house is the smell of rotting wood and the constant whisper of waves against the dock. I was eight when my parents gave me...

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