Ghost stories from North Carolina

The Static Throne

The basement of the old farmhouse in Millbrook, Vermont, smelled of damp earth and rusted iron. Our team, the Green Hollow Paranormal Society, had been hired by a woman named...

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The Night the Enumclaw Spoke

Mara slid the key into the lock of her apartment, the click echoing in the empty hallway. The smell of stale coffee and old books greeted her, a familiar comfort...

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The Lantern’s Vigil

Elias had never been a believer. His girlfriend, Mara, was. Their relationship was a battlefield of wills, a constant clash of stubbornness and pride. But when she asked him to...

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The Glass Eye of Red Hollow

In the autumn of 1998, I moved into a rented house in the unincorporated town of Red Hollow, a place that seemed to have been forgotten by time and GPS....

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The Cleaver in the Pines

Maya and I were doing our usual laps around the old gravel track that hugged the tree line. The autumn air was crisp, carrying the smell of damp leaves and...

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The Hollow Traipse

It was the summer of ’93 when I moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the salt marshes—a place that had been in my family for generations but...

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The Weeping Wall

The first time I saw the house, I was eight. My parents drove me up a winding gravel road, past cornfields that had gone to seed, and parked in front...

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The Passengers in the Back of My Mind

I’ve always considered myself a straightforward man, with simple routines and a grounded sense of the world. Mornings were for coffee and the commute, afternoons for the grind, and evenings...

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The Collector of Lost Hours

The trouble began, I think, with the blackout. Not the one that hit the whole neighborhood—that was just a storm, a tree branch, a transformer. I mean the one that...

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The Porcelain Smile

The old farmhouse had a way of holding onto silence. That night, the silence was heavier than usual, pressing down on the dusty floorboards and the peeling wallpaper. I was...

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The Field Between

I was watching my niece, Lily, for the weekend while my sister and her husband were at a medical conference. I was feeling a bit under the weather, so I...

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The Scent of Vinegar and Old Paper

Mara Wilkes was sixteen and had always believed in the quiet hum of the world beyond—the way a door would creak open in a still room, the inexplicable chill that...

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The Button Under the Pillow

I was nine, spending the summer at my grandmother’s farmhouse in the hills of Vermont, a place where the nearest neighbor was a mile down a dirt road and the...

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The Last Page

I was nineteen, a sophomore at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, where the winter buried everything under gray snow for months. I’d always been a night...

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The Silent Arithmetic

My name is Danny, and I’m fifteen. About eight months ago, my family moved into a renovated farmhouse on the edge of the Dahlia wetlands. We left a cramped apartment...

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The Winter of the Loom

My name is Adele, and I am 29. Until last year, I lived in a small, isolated town called Grey Hollow, nestled in a valley that seemed to catch every...

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The Loom in the Linen Closet

My grandmother’s house sat on a hill overlooking the salt marshes, a place where the fog rolled in like a gray tide. I’d grown up with the odd creaks and...

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The Last Ring

I’ve had my fair share of strange occurrences, but none have shaken me like that night in the old Meridian Hall. It was a converted dormitory for nursing students, a...

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The Mangler’s Locket

I didn’t use to believe in ghosts. I was a practical woman, a nurse, a mother of three, and my husband was a civil engineer. We lived in a renovated...

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The Bleacher Ghost

During my sophomore year at Westbrook High in Asheville, I had to take a mandatory phys ed class. I dreaded every second of it. The echoing shouts of the coach,...

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The Sugar Creek Hollow Door

I’m nineteen, a freshman at Briarwood College, nestled in the fog-choked valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Three months in, and this place feels like it’s been slowly peeling back...

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The Bridle Maker’s Loom

I hadn’t been back to the old Hollis place in years, not since the divorce scattered my life like wind-tossed seeds. But when my friend Marcus invited me out to...

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The Last Inventory

Marta had always considered herself a skeptic with an open mind. She loved ghost stories but never believed they could touch her world. That all changed when she inherited her...

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The Drowned Ledger

I live in the flatlands of western Kansas, where the wheat fields stretch like a yellow ocean and the only hills are the abandoned grain elevators that dot the horizon....

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