Ghost stories from North Carolina

The Call of the Empty Booth

It was a Tuesday night shift at the Tumbleweed Diner, a lonely dot on the map between two dead-end highways. I was nineteen, working the graveyard shift, and the place...

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The Concrete Flower

In the sweltering July of 2006, Corporal Jake Morrison and his wife, Elena, lived in a squat, sun-bleached duplex in the aging housing block of Fort Calloway, a base scheduled...

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The Kite’s Tail

My mother’s younger brother, Danny, vanished the summer I turned nine, in the dry heat of a Central Valley town where the only storms were dust devils and the occasional...

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The Brass Button Box

In the autumn of 1987, my father, a retired railroad engineer with an obsession for local history, brought home a battered steamer trunk from an estate sale in the foothills...

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The Whistle of the Hollow

I remember the house my father built with his own hands, a half-finished skeleton of a home that leaned into the wind like a tired old man. My room had...

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The Tiles of Room 314

On the night of January 16th, 2010, I lay in a hospital bed in the small town of Ashford, Massachusetts, staring at the ceiling tiles above me. The birth of...

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The Concierge of the Seventh Floor

My tenure at the Meridian Exchange, a LEED-certified glass tower in the heart of the city, was a study in controlled sterility. Every surface was recycled, every light was motion-censored,...

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The Blue Envelope

The last time I saw my father alive, he was sitting in a wheelchair by the window of the Suncrest Rehabilitation Center, staring at the parking lot. He was a...

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The Blue Room Vigil

Mara had never been one for alcohol. She preferred the gentle haze of weed, a soft blanket that smoothed the sharp edges of a stress-filled day. But last night, after...

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The Cinder Room

My husband, Daniel, has had sleep paralysis since he was sixteen. He’s thirty-three now. I’ve seen him stuck in those frozen moments, eyes wide, pleading, while something invisible sits on...

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The Green Shawl

In the autumn of 2019, I was a recently divorced woman living alone in a rented cottage at the edge of a small town. My name is Clara, and I...

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The Glass Ceiling of Room 14

In the autumn of 2012, I found myself and my partner, Carl, bunking at the faded Oceanview Motel on the blustery Oregon coast. We were between jobs, and the motel’s...

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The Perfect Fit

I was the only grandchild who made the trek to see Gran, bringing a casserole or a box of her favorite lemon cookies. Her house smelled of mothballs and dried...

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The Porcelain Reflection

The house on Maple Street had been a compromise. After the divorce, I needed a place that felt stable, and the quiet neighborhood with its manicured lawns and friendly waves...

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The Glass Eye of Prudence

The morning sun finally clawed through the grimy windows of the motel, and I knew I could put it into words. Not that the light made it any less real,...

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The Sunken Choir

The idea came to me during a week of sleepless nights and a cheap anthology of maritime myths. I’d devoured every ghost story I could find, but the one that...

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The Ring of Static

The house on Maple Street had always creaked, but tonight, every groan felt like a held breath about to break. Lena sat on the floor of her childhood bedroom, now...

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The Last Photograph

In October 2017, I found myself driving through the winding roads of the Smoky Mountains, heading to a secluded resort that my friend Eliza had raved about. She and her...

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The Hollow One

The night nurse’s station hummed with fluorescent light, casting a sterile pallor over the vinyl floor. I was dozing on a break room couch, my body angled into the cushions,...

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The Runner in the Hollow

We came to the hollow in late autumn, when the leaves were already dead but not yet fallen. The house was still breathing dust from the framing, but we didn’t...

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The Lanterns of the Crawlspace

I’m Marcus, sixteen, the eldest of four in a creaking farmhouse outside a town that doesn’t even show up on most maps. My folks run a struggling pumpkin patch, and...

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The Pale Figure in the Half-Bath

The new trailer park sat on the edge of a town that had given up on itself, near a canal that would choke on algae every summer. My family moved...

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The Hollow Glade Pact

At sixteen, I thought I had mastered the art of leaving my body. I had read every book on astral projection in the county library, and I could slip out...

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The Hollow Mannequin

I never told anyone about the mannequin. Not even my mother, who would have dismissed it as a child’s nightmare, or my father, who would have laughed it off as...

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