Ghost stories from North Carolina

The Hollow Harmony

In the heart of the Mississippi Delta, where the cotton fields stretched like a pale sea under the August sun, lay the small town of Cane Hollow. Its population of...

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The Salt Circle of Cedar Falls

I’ve always prided myself on being pragmatic. Ghost stories, Ouija boards, all that—they were just superstition to me, folklore for the easily spooked. But when my husband’s colleague, a man...

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The Silent Alarm

It was the autumn of my twelfth year, and we had just moved into the old farmhouse on Birch Road, far from the city’s noise. My new school was a...

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The Lantern at the Edge of Morgan Hollow

I was born with a peculiar gift, though ‘gift’ might be too kind a word. Before I could even form thoughts, I would see them—tall, faceless shapes that drifted through...

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The Pale One at Miller’s Pond

I was nine when my mother started taking me to her lab at the old textile mill on the outskirts of Blackwood. The building had been converted into a research...

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The Ceiling Fan’s Last Spin

In the summer of 2012, I found myself standing on the creaking porch of my father’s cabin in the Cascade foothills of Oregon, the air thick with pine and the...

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The Unseen Visitor

I’ve always been acutely aware of the unseen, a trait I inherited from my mother. But last night, that awareness turned into something far more primal, a fear that lodged...

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The Patient Pattern

After three months of dust and silence, the old farmhouse on Cinder Lane had finally welcomed its owner back. Elena, a botanist who had spent the summer cataloging rare orchids...

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The Static in the Walls

The house on Maple Street was supposed to be a fresh start. When I was seven, my mom, stepdad, and older sister moved into that two-story colonial with a porch...

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The Painted Floor

I don’t live in that house anymore. I moved out two years ago, into a small apartment with my fiancé, in a town far from the old mill town where...

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The Clacking CDs

My name is Elara, and I’ve always been a magnet for the inexplicable. Most kids see shadows in the corners of their rooms; I saw shadows that moved with purpose....

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The Wall That Remembered

My husband had always said that Bill’s Pawn & Gun was a place where you could find anything, from a used crossbow to a vintage coin collection. I’d been there...

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The Iron Latch

In the autumn of her junior year, Mara moved into the converted textile mill that the university now called ‘Holloway House.’ It was a cavernous brick building with floors of...

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The Porcelain Garden

My name is Lena, and this is the story of the first time I saw something that should not exist. I was nine, and my grandmother on my stepmother’s side...

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The Static Between Stations

I never thought much about the house on Maple Street, with its beige siding and a front door that always stuck in the humidity. We moved in when I was...

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The Visitor in the Window Seat

My mother, Edna, has always been one to keep odd hours, but last autumn, when I came to stay with her for a few weeks, I found that her sleeplessness...

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The Static in the Walls

I’ve never been one for ghost stories. Growing up with severely limited vision, I learned to trust other senses—the creak of a floorboard, the shift of air when someone enters...

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The corridors of St. Agatha’s Rehabilitation Center always felt wrong after midnight. Not abandoned, but watched. The fluorescent lights hummed a tired lullaby, casting a pale, sickly glow that pooled...

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The Porcelain Doll in the Attic

My family moved to the quiet town of Ashford when I was six, into a sprawling Victorian house that had stood empty for years. I grew up there, and for...

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The Cattail Field Promise

The first time I noticed Elias, he was a smudge of khaki and mud at the edge of the cattail field behind our apartment complex. I was nine, new to...

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The Salt of the Earth

The first sign was the lock on the kitchen window—a cheap brass thing that had always stuck. No matter how many times I jimmied it, it would refuse to budge...

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The Gardener’s Debt

Every summer, my father’s garden was a kingdom of green, a sprawling patchwork of vegetables and flowers that spilled from the backyard of his small North Carolina farmhouse into the...

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The Last Floorboard

The house on Maple Street had a way of holding its breath. I remember that summer before my sister Eleanor left for college, when I was twelve and my little...

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The Glass Man

I was eleven when the glass man first appeared, though I didn’t know that’s what I’d call him until years later. We had just moved to a rented cottage on...

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