Ghost stories from North Carolina

The Last Ferry Out

In the autumn of 1987, I was seventeen and living with my family on the coast of Maine, in a small fishing village called Prower’s Point. My parents had moved...

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The Ghost Bus of Grove Street

The final bell rang at 3:27, but I had already started packing my bag. I was a senior at Westbrook High, and the only thing on my mind was escaping...

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The Glass Harvest

My girlfriend Nadia has a history that most people would find hard to believe. It’s not my place to share every detail, but suffice it to say, her childhood was...

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The Man with the Lantern

Every morning at 5:30, rain or shine, I took our border collie, Max, for his constitutional along the gravel path that skirted the old Miller farm. The route was as...

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The Twisted Oak

The lease on the old place was up, and with my second child on the way, we had to find something fast. My husband, Daniel, and I were running out...

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The Static at Milepost 12

It was still dark when I left for the night shift at the grain silo, the dashboard clock reading 5:47. The county road stretched ahead, a black ribbon through the...

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The Vanishing Garter

The first time it happened, I blamed the draft from the old boiler in the basement of our rented flat. It was a Tuesday, just past eleven, and I had...

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The Glass Harmonium

I never believed in anything I couldn’t see, until the summer of my twelfth year, when my family moved to the old Hartley house on Prudence Lane. The house was...

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The Lavender Letter

I never met my grandmother-in-law, but I know her through the stories my husband, Daniel, told me. She was a tiny Japanese woman, always humming old war tunes, and she...

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The Last of the Blue Herons

Eleanor and I had shared our home with a dozen animals over the years, but only two had been ‘only children,’ and for both of them, that status had lasted...

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The Lantern in the Salt

My name is Elias, and I need to tell someone what happened before I lose the ability to speak at all. For seven years, my life has been slowly unstitched,...

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The Hollow Rock

It was the summer of 1958 when my father first noticed the chair. We had just moved into the old farmhouse on the outskirts of Harker’s Hollow, a town that...

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The Heron’s Lament

Riley had always found solace in the murky waters of Lake Bracken, a place where the cypress trees grew straight from the shallows and the air hung heavy with the...

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The Static in the Pines

The first time I noticed him, I was in the shed behind my cabin, sorting through boxes of my late uncle’s junk. It was late October, and the pines outside...

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The Stationmaster’s Ledger

The sun was still high over the dry grasslands when Marta Reyes pulled her dusty pickup into the gravel lot of the old abandoned train depot. She was a field...

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The Keepsake Couch

When Marlene’s mother downsized to a condo, she handed over the old floral-patterned sofa that had lived in the family room since Marlene was a kid. Marlene and her partner,...

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The Night of the Brass

I’ve lived my whole life with one foot in the ordinary world and one in the strange. As a kid, I saw things that would curdle your blood—shadows that moved...

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The Tin Soldiers of Cedar Lane

The late summer of 2010 was a time of oppressive heat in the dusty outskirts of Winslow, where the cicadas’ drone was a constant companion. I was a restoration artist,...

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The Hollow at Dawn

We moved into the old farmhouse in late autumn, when the fields were stubble and the trees skeletal against a bruised sky. My mother, her boyfriend Carl, and my aunt...

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The Damp Hallway

The old farmhouse we rented was a fixer-upper, but the price was right and the isolation was exactly what we needed after the chaos of the city. My wife, Elena,...

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The Paper Lantern Man

I was eight when the argument with my mother happened, not that I remember how it started. We were at her childhood home, a sprawling Victorian with a garden that...

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The Salt Line

The pickup truck rattled over the last dusty mile of ranch road, the tires spitting gravel like buckshot. Elias wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his...

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The Palisade Hour

I’ve always been drawn to old places, the kind that hold their breath when you walk in. My small town in the Oregon foothills is surrounded by others, each with...

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The Copper Cathode

The rain was coming down like God was emptying a bucket, and my windshield wipers were fighting a losing battle when my phone buzzed. It was Maya, my oldest friend,...

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