Ghost stories from Ohio

The Static Garden

The first time I heard it, I thought it was just the wind playing tricks on the microphone. But the more I listened to the recording, the clearer it became:...

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The Moonlight in Her Eyes

I’ve been a night-shift orderly at a rural convalescent home in the high desert for three years now. The facility, St. Cuthbert’s, clings to the edge of town like a...

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The Haunted House By The Tracks

The house seemed to come alive at night and not just because it sat next to a railroad tracks. The trains seemed to stir something within it. No wonder my...

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The Final Broadcast

The first time I heard it, I was sitting in the last pew of the old Hillcrest Chapel, a cramped, wooden building that smelled of damp hymnals and candle wax....

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The Laughing Grain

The trouble began in the fall, when the harvest festival rolled into Millbrook. It wasn’t the usual kind of trouble—no fights, no thefts, no accidents that could be explained. It...

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The Lantern Keeper

In the autumn of 1997, I was living in a small coastal town in Maine, working as a night auditor at a rundown motel called The Gull’s Rest. The motel...

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The Inheritance of Static

My grandmother, Elowen, was the only one who ever believed me. When I was a child, I’d sit on the peeling linoleum floor of her kitchen, tracing the pattern of...

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The Empty Seat

The whir of the fluorescent light was the only sound in the sterile white room. I sat at a metal table, two chairs, no windows, just a door. I knew...

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The Coal Man’s Visit

I was six when the knocking started. Not on the front door, but on the wall beside my bed, three slow thumps that never came at the same time of...

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The Lantern Keeper

When I was seven, we lived in a crooked farmhouse on the edge of the Thornwood, a forest so dense that sunlight barely touched its floor. My father had inherited...

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The Reversed Wavelength

Maya Chen had always been drawn to the static between stations, the way a radio would sputter and hiss before surrendering to silence. It was a fascination that had led...

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The Lantern Room

When I was eight, my family moved into my grandmother’s old farmhouse after she passed. It was a sprawling, creaking place with a room at the end of the upstairs...

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The Hollow Night

In the sweltering summer of 1934, on a sun-scorched farm in the Kansas dust bowl, ten-year-old Nellie Mayhew lay awake in the suffocating heat of the attic bedroom she shared...

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The Spit of the Unseen

At forty-four, Elara Voss had long since filed the incident under ‘childhood nightmares.’ It was a summer evening in the dusty town of Porphyry Creek, where the heat clung to...

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Mysteries of Pine Hollow Road

In the small town of Maplewood, there lies a winding road known as Pine Hollow. Nestled on the outskirts, it leads to the sprawling Evergreen Park, a haven for families...

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The Embers of Blackwood Creek

The old logging road, barely more than a scar on the face of the Blackwood Forest, was known only as ‘The Burn.’ Locals in the sleepy, forgotten town of Havenwood...

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The Hollow Kiln

The town of Ashburn lay nestled in a valley, and its pride was the old Calderwood Furnace, a brick-and-iron behemoth built in the 1890s to burn the dead. It had...

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The Hollow Fence

The sickly sweet smell of rotting leaves and damp earth clung to the air as Maya pedaled her bike along the gravel path that wound through the Hartwell Preserve. It...

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The Last Watch

The morning my brother stood before the judge, I was left to keep the house. At twelve, I was the man of the house now, a title I never asked...

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The Iron Gate Settlement

In the autumn of 2004, I moved my family into a dilapidated Victorian farmhouse on the outskirts of a dying prairie town called Merrow. The deed listed the construction date...

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The Ledger of Unmarked Echoes

The first time I noticed the stone, it was the way the late autumn sun hit it, making the worn granite look almost translucent. I was a graduate student in...

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The Convent’s Last Patient

In the autumn of 2004, I arrived at St. Agatha’s Vocational Institute, a crumbling Gothic pile perched on a hill above the rust-belt town of Millbrook. The building had been...

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The Root Cellar Bell

The house on Cedar Hill Road had always been a place of layered time. My grandfather, Elias, had built it with his own hands in 1952, on the same plot...

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The Butcher’s Apron

My grandmother’s farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains was a place of rusted machinery and overgrown pastures. As a child, I’d spend summers there, and I remember...

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