Ghost stories from North Carolina

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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The Christmas Visitor

Our family moved into the old farmhouse when I was four, a rambling place with a sagging porch and windows that seemed to watch the road. The first time I...

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The Plate That Waits

The retirement home sat at the edge of town, a low brick building that had once been a seminary. The rooms smelled of lemon polish and old wood, and the...

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The Gilded Afterlife

I’ve worked in the dietary wing of Cedar Hollow Manor for three years now, and in that time I’ve met a parade of souls shuffling toward their endings. But one...

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The Handrail That Remembered

When my cousin Evelyn asked me to housesit her new Victorian fixer-upper for a weekend, I jumped at the chance. The place was a maze of creaking floorboards and peeling...

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The Button Pusher

I lived in a brownstone on the edge of a sprawling campus, sharing the top floor with my brother Leo and two friends, Mira and Jenna. It was a converted...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

I’ve always been drawn to the spaces between, the places where the world seems to breathe a little too slowly. My name is Elias, and I’ve never been able to...

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The Cerulean Halo

I’ve never told this to anyone, not even my husband. It’s not that I’m afraid of being called crazy; it’s that the memory feels like a splinter I can’t dig...

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The Candleholder’s Ledger

My grandmother, Elara, had a gift for seeing beyond the veil. She used to say that the dead are like radio static—always there, sometimes breaking through with a clear signal....

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The Last Staircase

The following happened to me about a year ago. I only recently discovered this site and have been debating on whether to publish my experience. I’ve been afraid to, though...

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The Humming Static

Corporal Maya Tran had spent six years in the military, three of them in forward operating bases where sleep came in fits and starts, punctuated by mortar fire and the...

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The Lamp That Stutters

The old house on Birch Lane had a lamp in the upstairs hallway. It wasn’t special, just a brass thing with a cracked shade, but ever since we moved in,...

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The Iron Lung Room

The old Hartley mansion had stood on Maple Street for over a century, a looming Victorian with peeling paint and a sagging porch, its windows like vacant eyes. My family...

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The Frayed Cord

My mother, Eleanor, and I, Rowan, spent the better part of our lives in places where the air pressed against us like a damp hand. We’d moved from a cramped...

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The Hollow Familiar

Elara Vance lived in a quiet coastal town named Porthallow, where the sea mist rolled in like a ghost and the houses clung to the cliffs like barnacles. Her husband,...

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The Instrument of Thorns

In the autumn of 1994, I finally moved out of my parents’ house into a tiny, run-down cottage on the outskirts of a town called Blackwood. My best friend, Lena,...

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The Hollow of Hollow Creek

In the late summer of 2014, my entire extended family—my parents, my cousins, my aunts and uncles—rented a sprawling, three-story lodge overlooking the pine-choked shores of Lake Serenity in the...

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The Curtain of Dried Beans

My name is Elias Thorne, and I have always prided myself on my steady nerves. A car accident that left me with a shattered collarbone and a phobia of tailgating?...

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The Rectangle of Cobalt

I woke with a start, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. The remnants of a night terror clung to me—a vague, oppressive sense of wrongness, and...

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The Flickering Pigtails

The old hunting lodge sat at the edge of the Blackwood Forest, its timber frame groaning under the weight of decades. We’d rented it for a long weekend—a group of...

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The Last Faucet

My uncle Marcus passed away on a sweltering Tuesday in late August, 2019. I won’t dwell on the details of his death—they still carve fresh wounds. He had been in...

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The Static Between Floors

My name is Deputy Marshal Elias Vance, and I’ve worked the graveyard shift for the county for six years, mostly dealing with drunks and domestic calls. But what happened at...

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The Soap Dish Collector

I was nineteen when I finally moved out of the creaking Victorian on Maple Street, a house that had been in my family for generations. My grandmother left it to...

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The Ceiling Nail

I’ve cataloged spectral anomalies for two decades, ever since I found a Victrola in my grandmother’s attic that played a waltz no one had ever recorded. My name is Elias...

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