Ghost stories from New York

The Breath on the Back of My Neck

I was nine when I first understood that our house on Maple Street was not like other houses. It wasn’t the creaking floorboards or the drafts that made the curtains...

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The Iron Gate of Saint Kassiani

The year 2023 had not been kind to us here in the rural expanse of northern Minnesota. The spring thaw had brought relentless flooding that swallowed the low-lying roads, and...

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The Fourth Setting

I was twenty-two, living in a cramped attic apartment above a dusty antique shop in the town of Millbrook, working nights at a diner to pay for community college. My...

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The Draft in Room Five

Elena had always considered herself a practical woman, a fact her friends found amusing given her occupation as a museum archivist. She dealt in artifacts, in the tangible remnants of...

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The Ceiling of Unsaid Things

Marla had moved to the coastal town of Duncraggan six months after the incident at the old farmhouse. She thought the salt air and the constant cry of gulls would...

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The Hollow Man in the Hallway

My name is Elias, and I’m 27 now. The house I grew up in wasn’t just old; it was a monument to forgetfulness, a three-story Victorian with peeling wallpaper and...

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The Frame Between

After my stepmother passed, the house my father and I shared in the hills of Vermont seemed to exhale. The air, once thick with her lingering presence, thinned to a...

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The Seamstress in the Static

The last thing I wanted was to move into that sprawling, dust-choked Victorian my Great-Aunt Celia left me. I was a city guy, born and raised in the cramped, humming...

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The Hollow Floor

The autumn wind rattled the windows of our colonial on the edge of Cold Creek Hollow, a house as angular and stoic as the pines that surrounded it. I was...

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The Marble Guest

I have always been sensitive to the unseen. My grandmother called it ‘the sight,’ but I never fully believed her until I moved into my late aunt’s house in the...

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The Final Recipe

The day the hospice nurse left, my mother, Elara, sat up in bed with a vigor that startled me. For six months, the cancer had been a slow tide, receding...

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The Hollow Hound

The weekend before Labor Day, I started feeling wrong. Not sick like a cold, but a creeping dread that settled in my bones like damp fog. I’m not a paranoid...

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The Man in the Work Clothes

The new apartment was a fresh start, or so I told myself. It was a modest two-bedroom on the fourth floor of a pre-war building in the financial district, a...

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The Hollow Gaze

The night my world tilted, I was in the kitchen, nursing a cup of cold coffee, when the dog—a mutt named Biscuit—began to growl low in her throat. Her hackles...

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The Static in the Afternoon

It was a Tuesday, the kind of gray, indeterminate afternoon where the fluorescent lights in the office hummed like a trapped bee. My name is Mara, and I was deep...

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The Weight of Rusted Iron

Most people knew I had a bad back, but they never understood the true extent of it. The hardware in my spine—three screws, each a quarter-inch thick—was failing. One had...

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The Last Album

It was a chilly October evening when my wife, Elena, and I received the call from her sister, Marta, that Grandma Rosa had passed. Rosa had battled ovarian cancer for...

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The Amber Night

It was a Tuesday in late April, and I was slumped on the couch, the glow of the television painting the room in muted blues. My name is Sarah, and...

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The Hollow Doll

The house on Mulberry Lane had always felt like a held breath. We moved in during a wet October, and I remember the way the oak tree in the backyard...

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The Constant Halo

I began seeing them shortly after Dr. Anselm started her sessions with me, but I didn’t think much of it at first. They were like heat shimmer, or the afterimage...

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The Red Bramble

In the sweltering dusk of late August, in the quiet outskirts of a town that no longer appears on any map, a twelve-year-old boy named Ethan crouched on the cracked...

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The Attic of Unfinished Play

My grandmother’s house had a smell, a mixture of old wood, lavender sachets, and something faintly metallic, like rust. I moved in after she passed, mostly to escape the sterile...

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The Cobalt Figure

In the autumn of 2016, I was a recent college graduate working as a janitor at St. Aldric’s, a small, aging church nestled in the hills of upstate New York....

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The Marigold Procession

In the fall of 2016, I was part of a street-food festival in the sprawling concrete heart of a city that never sleeps. My station, a humble dumpling cart, sat...

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