Ghost stories from North Carolina

The Forecast of August

The first time I noticed something was off was during the summer of 1983, when my daughter Edie was five. We lived in a cramped duplex in Wichita, just a...

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The Cradle in the Crawlspace

The old farmhouse on Kelpwick Lane had always been a fixer-upper, but for Mira and her husband, Callum, it was a chance at a fresh start. They had two daughters,...

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The Crank of the Tin Man

The holidays at my aunt’s farmhouse were always a whirlwind of cinnamon and pine, but this year, a chill crept in that no fire could chase away. I’d inherited my...

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The Perpetual Tenant

The day we signed the lease on the old farmhouse, I felt a cold draft pass through the living room, even though all the windows were shut and the July...

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The Third Rotation

My name is Sarah, and I used to think that Macbeth had it wrong. It wasn’t sleep that was murdered; it was the quiet hum of ordinary life. That hum...

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The Yellow Gate

In the late summer of 1984, our subdivision of Cedar Hollow was a haven of kickball games and lemonade stands. Parents knew every child by name, and the few dead-end...

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The Ironwood Registry

The Ironwood Hotel rose from the granite shoulder of the mountain like a forgotten tooth. Its facade was a mottled gray stone, not the cheerful yellow of some lakeside resorts,...

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The Ledger of Unfinished Lines

Every morning at 6:45, Mira counted the cracks in her ceiling like rosary beads—a ritual she’d developed after the first incident. Her apartment on the fourth floor of the Selwyn...

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The Mystery of the Lost Child

One sunny morning, as I was getting ready for school, I heard a soft voice coming from the hallway. It sounded like a young girl, asking, “Where did everyone go?”...

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The Cartographer’s Last Request

In the summer of ’89, the old Vancourt house sat like a blackened tooth against the row of neat suburban homes on Maple Street. It had been gutted by a...

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The Salt and the Silence

We moved into the old farmhouse in the autumn of ’97, when the fields were a brittle gold and the crows gathered in the bare oaks like bad omens. My...

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The Last Blueberry

The summer I was twenty-two, I lived in a small apartment above a laundromat in a town that smelled of stale beer and pine. My grandmother, Nonna, had just died,...

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The Mannequin in the Parlor

I was nine when I first realized my grandmother was made of glass. Not literally, of course, but that’s how I thought of her: so fragile, so perfect, you’d think...

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The Lantern Keeper

My grandmother used to say that some places are like wounds in the world, and the house we moved into that October was one of them. It sat at the...

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The Spinning Bauble

In the winter of 1998, my partner Caleb and I spent Christmas Eve at my grandmother’s rural farmhouse, far from any city lights. I was heavily pregnant with our first...

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The Static Garden

I was six when we moved into the house on Maple Street, a run-down Victorian that my mother inherited from an aunt she barely remembered. The house smelled of dust...

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The Cadence of the Rotating Fan

I was fourteen that autumn, staying with my aunt Miriam and uncle Foster while my grandmother tended to my grandfather at the county hospital. His liver was failing, and his...

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In the sprawling suburbs of Oakhaven, where manicured lawns met the encroaching woods, my partner, Elias, and I ran an entity extraction service called ‘Residual Hauntings.’ We weren’t paranormal investigators...

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The Rotting Guest

The first time I heard the name Marrow House, I laughed. My brother-in-law, Dale, had a flair for the dramatic, and ‘Marrow House’ sounded like something from a cheap horror...

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The Room That Hated Fennel

My name is Mira, and I live with my three-year-old daughter, Elsie, in a modest house on Cedar Lane, a street of identical mid-century homes built for factory workers after...

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The Moth Boy of Cedar Hollow

It was a humid Thursday night in late August when my friend Nina and I were driving back from a late shift at the seafood shack in Ocracoke, heading to...

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The Cradle of the Elm

Maren had always been the pragmatic one in our family, the sort who laughed at ghost stories and chalked up every creak and groan of an old house to plumbing...

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The Winter Burial

The winter of 2008 had been brutal, the kind that crept into the bones and stayed. Our house, a drafty Victorian on the edge of a dying town, seemed to...

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The Whistle

One night I was putting my chickens away, locking them up so they would not get attacked. I was alone, waiting for my other sibling to get out there with...

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