Ghost stories from Ohio

The Perigee Cipher

I’ll start by saying this: I’m a geologist, not a medium. My name is Elias, and I live alone in a converted lighthouse on the Oregon coast, two miles from...

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The Porcelain Hare

My grandmother Lila died when I was twenty-two, not from a disease or old age, but from a fall down the stairs in her own home. It was a cruel...

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The Stove’s Cold Breath

The journal entry for March 3rd read: ‘Him again, by the pantry.’ That’s all I could muster that night. Four years later, when my therapist asked me to document the...

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The Keepsake in the Wall

My grandmother’s farmhouse had a way of keeping things. Not in the way of hoarding, but in the way of holding onto memories, and occasionally, objects that had been lost...

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The Lathe in the Loft

I’ve been a lurker on this site for years, reading stories about strange occurrences and unexplained phenomena. Now, at nineteen, I finally feel compelled to share my own experience. Maybe...

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The Static Between Stations

The summer I turned nine, my family moved to a coastal town where fog rolled in like a second tide. Our rental was a narrow Victorian with a turret that...

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The Hollow Watch

In the autumn of 2009, I was a twelve-year-old boy with an unquenchable thirst for the unknown. My family had recently moved to a remote corner of Vermont, where our...

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The Lathe’s Lament

My apartment came with a ghost, though the landlord, Mrs. Gable, preferred the term ‘resident spirit.’ It was her late husband, Arthur, a retired engineer who’d spent his final years...

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The Cold Draw

I was on the road for a week, finalizing a merger for a client in the Pacific Northwest. The small town of Ashford, Oregon, wasn’t on my radar, but the...

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The Knocker at the Gable

The house sat at the end of a gravel lane, a hunched Victorian that seemed to sigh with every gust of wind. I had moved there with my daughter, Lily,...

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The Lantern on the Windowsill

The last time I saw Uncle Martin, he was sitting in his favorite armchair by the bay window, a Bible open on his lap. The evening light caught the dust...

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The Clockwork Lullaby

My father, a man who treated the internet as a vast, dusty attic, scored a bargain on a vintage music box. It arrived in a battered cardboard box, the seller...

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The Salt in the Drawer

I’d been grinding away at my novel for hours, the cursor blinking like a metronome in the dark of my study. The house was quiet, save for the faint hum...

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The Blue Jar

I moved in with my grandmother, Elsie, during my junior year, in the fall of 1986. Her house was a small brick bungalow on the outskirts of a town that...

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The Static Between Stations

The autumn of 1987 settled over the town of Garnett, Kansas, like a shroud of dust. My farmhouse, a weathered structure set a quarter-mile off the gravel road, had always...

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The Stairs That Remember

I had never left the Gulf Coast, where the air tastes of salt and the ground is flat as a pancake. So when my boyfriend, Carl, lost his job in...

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The Perpetual Ink

My name is Eleanor, and I’ve spent my adult life chasing the faint static of the supernatural. I was an archivist at the Hartwell Municipal Archive, a place I loved...

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The Cartographer’s Gift

The house on Maple Street had always seemed ordinary, a modest two-story with a wraparound porch and a yard full of wild roses. That was before my mother, Elinor, moved...

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The Iron Hearth

The day I moved into the Garnett House, the moving van couldn’t fit down the alley, so we had to haul everything through the front gate and up the porch...

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The Unlit Wing

The old brick dormitory at Northgate State had been converted from a tuberculosis sanatorium in the 1950s, and the conversion had done little to mask its past. Long corridors of...

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The Static in the Ceiling Fan

The first time I noticed the visitor, I was eight years old, living in a cramped two-bedroom apartment above my uncle’s pawnshop. My room was a converted closet, barely big...

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The Hollow Gaze of the Lantern Room

The lighthouse on Porphyry Point had been abandoned for decades, its lantern room dark and gutted by storms. I, Elara, had taken the summer job as a caretaker for the...

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The Knuckle Politeness

We’d been in the old house for three years, ever since my wife’s job transferred us to this dusty corner of the state. The place was a relic, a 1912...

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