Ghost stories from North Carolina

The Hollow Creek Incident

My name is Daniel, and for the past decade, I’ve been haunted by an experience that defies all logic. It began in the autumn of 2013, when I moved to...

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The Vanishing of Pepper

I remember the day Pepper came into our lives. A scruffy terrier mix with a white patch over one eye, my aunt brought him over in a cardboard box, still...

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The Unseen Visitor

I had always been a skeptic, even after everything. The house on Maple Street was supposed to be our fresh start, a place where my wife, Elena, and our son,...

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The Pattern in the Static

For most of my life, I dismissed the supernatural as the province of the overly imaginative. But after the incident on the old Taggart Bridge—the one I’ve never fully explained—I...

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The Hollow Hour

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. I was the girl who laughed at horror movies, who mocked the Ouija board at sleepovers, who chalked up every creak and groan...

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The Weight of the Clock

When I was sixteen, I lived with my father in a two-story house that always smelled of burnt coffee and old wood. We weren’t close; he worked nights and slept...

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The Thawing

It happened during my junior year, when the autumn rains turned the streets of our small coastal town into rivers of slick, black asphalt. My grandmother’s house sat on a...

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The Patchwork Room

The house on Hemlock Lane was a sprawling Victorian, painted a faded yellow that peeled like sunburnt skin. It had three floors, a turret that overlooked the overgrown garden, and...

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The Paper-Mill Children

I’ve never told anyone outside my immediate family about this. It’s too strange, too implausible, and frankly, I’m not sure I believe it myself, even after everything that happened. But...

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The Painted Smile

My grandmother’s house was a labyrinth of forgotten things, and the box of secondhand toys in the attic was just another layer of dust. I was eight, bored, and snooping...

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The Chimney Claws

Our farmhouse sat at the edge of the Ralston Flats, a stretch of land so flat and empty that the horizon seemed to swallow sound. My daughter Lily turned three...

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The Hairline Crack

My house sits at the edge of town, where the pavement gives way to a meadow that rolls into the woods. They built it in 2008, a cheap imitation of...

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The Cinder Man

The afternoon sun blazed through the slats of the plywood window, painting stripes of gold across the dust motes that danced in the stale air. I was in the workshop,...

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The Second Voice

The summer I turned fourteen, the cicadas stopped singing. Not in our yard, not in the whole of Harlow County. The air hung thick and wet, like the inside of...

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The January Washroom

The January Washroom It was the spring of 2011, and I was in fifth grade at Cedar Ridge Elementary, a school that had only opened two years prior. The building...

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The Perimeter of Pine and Ash

I have always prided myself on my logical mind. As a botanist, I deal in observable phenomena, testable hypotheses. So when the thing appeared on the edge of my property,...

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The Harvester’s Posture

In the autumn of my thirteenth year, the town of Gray Hollow seemed to hold its breath. The leaves turned brittle and brown, and the wind carried a silence that...

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The Bell Tower’s Last Toll

I never told anyone about the bell tower. Not even my husband, Marcus, who knows every other secret of mine. We moved to the town of Halden Creek for his...

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The Cupboard’s Reply

In the autumn of my eleventh year, I was invited to spend a half-day at my friend Mina’s farmhouse. Our school had let us out early for teacher training, and...

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The Lantern Maker’s Debt

In the damp October of 2013, I was stationed at Fort Marlowe, a sprawling base carved into the pine barrens of New Jersey. I had just received orders for a...

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The Shape in the Walls

When I was seven, my family moved into a tired old farmhouse at the edge of a cornfield that never seemed to yield. The previous owners had left in a...

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The Lace-Curtain Vigil

I’ve always been sensitive to the thin places, the moments when the veil between worlds grows gauzy. Not every day, not on command, but when the house settles into a...

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The Fourth Outline

The summer of 2008, I moved my bed into the room that had been my father’s study. It was a cramped, windowless space at the back of the house, the...

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The Serpent’s Lullaby

In the winter of 2004, our small farmhouse on the edge of the Blackwood Forest became a tomb of silence. My daughters, Elara and little Mae, were tucked in their...

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