Ghost stories from New York

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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The Empty Overalls

The old farmhouse on Bellhollow Road came to us cheap, which should have been the first warning. My parents, always chasing a bargain, believed they’d found a diamond in the...

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The Last Can of Crimson

I never thought I’d tell this story, but there’s a weight to it that I can’t carry alone anymore. I grew up in the heart of Chicago, in a neighborhood...

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The Cradle Chant of Peat Hollow

My name is Elena, and this is the story of how our little prefab home in the marsh became a shrine to something that should never be sung to. We...

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We Meet Again

My name is Justin and I have been in my brand new house for almost 5 years now and I still remember what I saw and to this day it...

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The Cold Grove

My grandfather used to tell me that land remembers. He said the soil keeps what it’s given, even when the world above forgets. I never understood that until I found...

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The Gristle Bloom

The farmhouse on Bone Hollow Road had always felt like a living thing to me, its timbers groaning like old joints, its windows like rheumy eyes. I’d grown up with...

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The Ledger of Ashes

The summer of 2006 was the hottest on record in our corner of the state, and the heat seemed to seep into every crack of our lives. We had lost...

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The Paperweight of St. Elmo

It was the summer I turned seventeen, the summer I thought I’d outgrown the childish fear of the dark. My parents had left for the 24-hour pharmacy to pick up...

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At thirteen, Marisol was obsessed with the supernatural. She devoured books on phantoms, watched documentaries on spectral phenomena, and begged her parents to take her to historic sites rumored to...

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The Lavender Room

When I was nine, my family moved into my grandmother’s old boarding house in the town of Ashwick, a place where the trees grew so thick they swallowed the streetlights...

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The Static Between Calls

When the text came through, I nearly dropped my phone. It was a chain letter, but not the kind that promised good luck or threatened bad luck if you didn’t...

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The Porcelain of the Unfinished Room

For most of my life, I’ve kept a mental scrapbook of things that don’t fit the world’s tidy explanations. There are maybe a dozen pages in that book, but one...

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The Lingering Static

On the night of the harvest moon in late October, I lost my grandmother, Elara, to the quiet stillness of her cluttered attic room. She had lived with my family...

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The Drowned Orchard

My name is Lena, and if you’ve ever seen the map of our town, you’d notice a strange gap in the middle of a dense patch of woods—a place called...

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The Cull in the Corners

The summer I turned seventeen, my parents uprooted us from the flat Texas plains to the damp, forested hills of upstate New York. They’d bought a fixer-upper near the Canadian...

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The Hollow Bed

My grandmother, Elara, never spoke of it directly, but the story passed down through our family like a cold draft under a door. It began in the autumn of 1952,...

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The Unnumbered Rooms

I was twenty-one and needed money for the fall semester, so when my uncle got me a job as a textbook clerk for the district, I took it without thinking....

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The Click of a Dead Switch

In October 2018, my wife, my two boys, and I moved into a rundown farmhouse on the edge of a vast, fog-shrouded cranberry bog in eastern Massachusetts. The house was...

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The Hummingbird Room

June had barely begun when we rolled up to the place, and already the air smelled of cut grass and something else, something sweet and wrong, like fruit left too...

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The Wallpaper Bloom

I was seven when we moved into the ground-floor flat on the edge of the old mill district. The building had once been a textile factory, and the apartment was...

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The Mirror at the End of the Line

My grandmother, whom we simply called ‘Oma’, was a woman of paradoxes. She had the delicate hands of a pianist and the vocabulary of a sailor, and she could quote...

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The Ball That Remembered

Elliot, Maya, and I had been a trio since the fifth grade, when a shared love of horror movies and a disdain for the school’s athletic program bound us together....

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The Loom of the Unfinished Room

I was six when we moved into the house on Hemlock Lane, a sprawling Victorian that had stood empty for nearly a decade. My parents were drawn to its bones—the...

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