Ghost stories from Ohio

The Tanglewood Orchard

My grandmother’s farm sat at the edge of a wind-scoured valley in the Missouri Ozarks, where the soil ran thin and the trees grew in knots. The house itself was...

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The Top-Floor Tapping

My sister Clara and her family—her husband Dan, and their six-year-old niece Zoe—moved into the top floor of an old Victorian house on Maple Street, just over two years ago....

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The Lantern in the Attic

In the summer of 1987, our small town of Ashford, nestled in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, was shaken by a tragedy that would leave a permanent stain on...

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The Smoke Hound of Maple Lane

In a small, sleepy town outside of Columbus, Ohio, there stood an aging farmhouse on Maple Lane that had been in my family for generations. My mother, a single parent,...

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The Grinning Slate

In the small coastal town of Portharrow, where the sea often swallowed the sun before it truly set, I grew up in the shadow of my grandfather, Elias. He was...

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The Last Coat of Paint

Lena had always been suspicious of the house on Maple Street. It stood there, a brick colonial with peeling white shutters, like a stubborn old man refusing to acknowledge the...

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The Willow-Watcher

I never believed in ghosts—not until the day I found myself standing at the edge of Blackwood Vale Cemetery, a place older than the town that had grown around it....

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The Tally in the Static

The first time I saw the girl with the hollow eyes, I was six, sitting on the linoleum floor of a rented duplex in Shreveport, Louisiana. My mother had dragged...

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The Grinning Figure in the Attic

My childhood was spent in a creaky Victorian house that backed onto an old, neglected cemetery. The house belonged to my grandparents, and my room was on the second floor,...

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The Camera’s Third Eye

The autumn leaves were a riot of burnt orange and crimson, and Lena couldn’t resist capturing the fleeting beauty on her phone. She snapped a few shots of the fiery...

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The Salt Harvest

The summer before my senior year, my cousin Marcus told me about a dried-up lakebed called the Salt Flats, where the ground was cracked like old porcelain and nothing grew....

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The Last Tenant of Ashford Hall

I never thought of myself as particularly sensitive. Sure, I sometimes knew someone was behind me before I saw them, and I could feel when a room was wrong, like...

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The Apparition of Ashford Lane

When I was seven, my family moved into the old Marrow House on Ashford Lane, a sprawling Victorian that had been in my grandfather’s family for generations. My parents had...

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The Sour Orchard

My great-aunt Marigold had nine children, and my mother was the youngest of them all, so our family gatherings were always a chaotic swarm of cousins, aunts, and uncles. They...

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The Foreman’s Return

When I was a kid, my parents bought a condemned textile mill on the edge of a dying town in upstate New York. The mill had been shut down for...

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The Grease-Stained Apron

My first memory of the dead wasn’t a ghost story. It was a bowl of chili and a chipped ceramic spoon in a place called Elmer’s Diner, a run-down greasy...

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The Lantern’s Vigil

My first clear memory of something inexplicable happened when I was eight, during a bout of scarlet fever that kept me bedridden for a week. We lived in a sprawling...

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The Lantern Man

I had never believed in ghosts, not really. Growing up in the arid flats of New Caelum, I’d heard the usual stories—whispers of miners lost in the borax fields, the...

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The Donut Stone Prophecy

In the autumn of 2013, I found myself drawn to the old donut-shaped crystal that had once belonged to my grandmother. It was a simple thing, a circle of smoky...

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The Veiled Vigil

The February cold crept through the old farmhouse like a second tenant, settling into the floorboards and breathing frost onto the windowpanes. I’d taken to sleeping on the living room...

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The Cold Draft from the Canning Room

It was supposed to be a peaceful weekend at my aunt’s farmhouse, nestled at the edge of the Whispering Pines—a name I always found ironic since the trees were dead...

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The Curbstone Visitor

In the autumn of my fifteenth year, my family moved into the old Marrow apartments on the edge of a town called Hollow Creek. The complex was a maze of...

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The Vanishing Porch Light

I never believed in the old stories about the Hollow Pines apartments, not until the summer I turned sixteen. We’d moved there after Dad’s transfer to a dusty Texas town,...

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The Tar Paper Nest

I’ve always had a taste for the strange, a hobbyist of the uncanny, but nothing in my collection of ghost stories and folklore prepared me for that night at my...

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