Ghost stories from Ohio

The Moth in the Nightlight

It had been a year since the first incident. I had moved from that cramped apartment on Maple Street to a small house on the edge of town, hoping to...

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The Glittering Threshold

I never believed in the stories about the old Wentworth Arms. It was just a run-down apartment building near the university, with creaky floors and radiators that clanked like bones....

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The Last Name Card

Three weeks before our wedding, my fiancé Marcus and I were hunched over the dining table, surrounded by cream-colored name cards and a seating chart that looked like a spiderweb...

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The Night the Lobby Held Its Breath

It was a Tuesday, a week before the unsettling events at my old apartment, and I was visiting my aunt Clara at her residence, a state-run tower for seniors in...

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The Clockmaker’s Arithmetic

The house at 13 Meridian Lane had a hum that never quite resolved into a tune, like a radio caught between stations. My name is Anya Voss, and I moved...

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The Glass Comb

The first thing I noticed was the cold. Not the usual chill of an autumn morning, but a damp, bone-deep cold that clung to the air like a second skin....

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The Cartographer’s Blight

Mara, a 34-year-old single mother of three, lived in a small, perpetually damp town called Hollow Falls, nestled in a valley where the sun rarely pierced the thick fog. She...

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The Cat’s Cradle of Static

I’m 32 and I’ve always been the pragmatic type. My wife, Elena, she’s the spiritual one. She grew up in a house full of old-world superstitions, her grandmother a curandera...

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The Dust That Breathes

I’m Marcus. I’m sixteen, and I live with my family in a sprawling Victorian house that my great-grandfather built on the outskirts of a small town in the Pacific Northwest....

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The Looming Orchard

The house sat at the edge of a dead apple orchard, its gnarled branches clawing at the sky like skeletal fingers. My name is Sam, and my wife, Rachel, and...

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The Winter’s Board

The snow came down in thick, silent flakes, burying the campus of Cedar Ridge Reformatory under a pristine white shroud. I was fifteen, and it was the first week of...

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The Planchette’s Promise

It was the tail end of February, 1978, and I was sixteen, sitting in the common room of Cedar Ridge, a boys’ reformatory tucked into the pine woods of northern...

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The Paperclip Debt

Mara and her husband, Derek, were finally tackling the chaos of the spare room they’d been avoiding for months. The goal was simple: empty it, paint it, and turn it...

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The Porcelain Garden

The first time I set foot in Marcus’s house, I was carrying a box of my mother’s famous oatmeal cookies, the ones with the secret toffee bits that could make...

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The Salt and the Static

The call came on a Tuesday, not a Saturday, and it wasn’t about a choir practice. It was a text from my sister, Lila, her words clipped and cold: ‘Come...

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The Window Watcher

On a quiet Tuesday morning in late October, Evelyn was at her desk in the home office when her phone buzzed with a text from her daughter, Maya. ‘Morning, Mom....

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The Frosted Tile

When I moved into the old Pemberton Arms in the fall of ’98, I knew it had character. The landlords, a Mr. and Mrs. Harlow, were ancient and half-deaf, and...

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The Stag’s Gaze

I’ve spent half my life trying to convince myself that the things I see aren’t real. I’ve picked apart every vision, every flicker of premonition, and every cold spot in...

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The Hollow Night

It was the last October before the mill shut down for good, and the whole town of Ashford had turned out for the Harvest Burn. My family’s farm, the old...

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The Fourth Loop at Blackwater Bridge

The summer of ’98, I was walking back from the all-night pharmacy on Meridian Avenue, just past midnight. The air was thick with the smell of rain that hadn’t come...

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The Unlatched Night

In the summer of ’94, the Ashford family had just moved into a cramped ground-floor unit on the edge of a sleepy town called Barrow’s End. The apartment complex was...

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The Hollow Between the Stairs

It began on a Tuesday, not with a scream or a cold draft, but with a creak. My name is Elowen, and for the past six months, I’ve been seeing...

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The Locket of Cedar Hollow

My name is Elara, and I am fourteen. I live with my grandmother in Cedar Hollow, a town that seems to be perpetually draped in mist, nestled in the Appalachian...

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The Final Play

I’ve always had a strange relationship with the idea of ghosts. They fascinate me, but they also terrify me in a way that nothing else does. Call it a phobia...

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