Ghost stories from New York

The Amber Typing

My wife’s grandmother, Nonna Rosa, had three siblings: two sisters, Fiorella and Carmela, and a brother, Matteo, who died before I ever met my wife. They were born in a...

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The Unnoticed Client

The office at Sterling & Craine occupied a narrow slice of the twenty-seventh floor, a cramped labyrinth of beige cubicles and humming computers where the walls seemed to lean inward....

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The Barrier of Light

On the first Tuesday of autumn, my sister-in-law, Mira, was driving home from a late shift at the hospital when a deer darted out of the treeline. She swerved, but...

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The Capacitor Garden

I had never paid much attention to the old graveyard that had been converted into a park, mostly because it sat across the street from my apartment, which meant I...

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The Processional of the Unlit Path

The road from Darian’s cabin to the old Millbrook place was a ribbon of blacktop that the forest had been slowly swallowing for years. At 2 AM, it was less...

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The Blue Door at Number 14

The first time I saw the house at 14 Millbrook Lane, I was eight years old, standing at the end of a gravel drive that wound through overgrown rhododendrons. It...

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The Winter Gardener’s Exhibit

The ferry cut through the gray chop of the harbor, its horn a mournful note that hung in the icy air. I was on my way to Staten Island, not...

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The Lattice of Bone

The fall of that year brought the Havershams to the lot behind ours, a family of three with a moving truck that groaned like a dying beast. They arrived in...

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The Penny Ledger

Last autumn, I drove up to visit my college roommate, Dana, who had just moved to a sleepy town in the Hudson Valley. Her new place was a converted carriage...

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The Basaltic Corridor

I was fourteen when my family moved to the old Kessler farmhouse, a skeletal structure of gray stone and slate that hunched at the end of a gravel drive. The...

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The Hanging Garden of Concrete

The first time I noticed something was off was the day we moved into the old apartment building on Meridian Street. It was late August, humid as a wet wool...

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The Wren’s Lullaby

The old house on Maple Street had been a bargain, and for the first few months, it felt like a steal. Laura, her husband Tom, their son Jake, and Jake’s...

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The Glimmering Drift

Thea had just flipped the last burger onto the platter when the first bubble drifted past her face. It was a perfect sphere, catching the late-afternoon sun, and inside it,...

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The Ledger of Unfinished Lines

For six months, I had been trying to write the story of my brother, Julian. Not his life, but the night he vanished into the fog that rolled off the...

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The Pocket Watch in the Piano

The old farmhouse on Cedar Lane had been a refuge for me after my divorce—a place to heal, to breathe, to start over. The previous owner had left a few...

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The Ledger of Hours

In the autumn of my thirteenth year, I lived in a rented house on the edge of a town that had forgotten its own name. The walls were thin, the...

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The Vent’s Lament

I live in a third-floor walk-up in the old Meridian building, a relic of the 1920s with creaky pipes and a radiator that clanks like a ghost in chains. My...

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The Static in the Grain

The first time I tried to write about Petey, the words turned to static on the page. I blamed my ancient laptop, then the flickering tablet, then my own failing...

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The Sunlit Room

In the summer of 2012, my cousin Leo and I decided to try something we had read about on a ghost-hunting forum: Electronic Voice Phenomenon, or EVP. We were in...

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The Unfinished Wake

The last time I saw my great-uncle Marcus, he was wearing a tie I’d never seen before. It was a garish thing, a pattern of red and gold parrots against...

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The Cement-Cold Gate

The night air clung to my skin like a damp shroud as I stepped onto the back porch, the wooden boards groaning underfoot. My house sat on the edge of...

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The Gray Thread

Marta had always been meticulous about her laundry, a ritual she performed with the precision of a surgeon. Her basement, with its exposed pipes and faint smell of detergent, was...

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The Cart Woman of Saint Elia

It was a Tuesday in early October, and my first-grade class at Saint Elia’s Academy had walked the three blocks to the old stone chapel for our monthly Mass. The...

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The Marrow Gate

The call came at 9:14 AM on the seventeenth of February, a day I will never forget. It was my mother-in-law, Vera, her voice thin and trembling, saying the hospital...

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