Ghost stories from Ohio

The Lantern in the Root Cellar

My three years in the old farmhouse on Cinder Lane had taught me to ignore the creaks and groans, the way the wind would sometimes mimic a child’s sobbing through...

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The Basement of the Old Mill

My name is Daniel, and for the past three years I’ve worked as a night watchman at the Crescent Mill, a sprawling, decrepit textile factory that sits on the edge...

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The Stained Glass Nursery

The first thing I remember is the smell of formaldehyde mixed with the faint sweetness of flowers. I was born in the back room of the old Mayhew Funeral Home,...

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The Long Way Down

The first time it happened, I was sitting cross-legged on the thin carpet of my apartment, the only sound the hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen. I’d been trying...

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The Painted Veil

In the salt-scoured town of Greyhaven, where the sea fog crawled through the streets like a living thing, I grew up with a secret companion. Her name was Lena, and...

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The Lavender Intruder

I was nine when I first saw her, though I didn’t know it then. We lived in a sprawling Victorian house on the edge of a town that time forgot,...

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The Static Man

In the autumn of 1989, I moved into a small, drafty apartment above a closed laundromat. The rent was cheap, and the landlord, a taciturn man named Mr. Hollis, warned...

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The Empty Stretch

It was 1985, and the four of us—Marcus, Elias, Ray, and I—had driven three hours north to camp along the Crooked River, a dark, slow-moving waterway that snaked through the...

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The Static Garden

In the autumn of 1995, I moved into the third floor of a crumbling Victorian on Willow Street in the small town of Ashfield. The apartment was cheap, and the...

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The Payphone on Hollow Road

It was a sticky August night in 1987, and the clock on the dash of my rusted Ford Fiesta read 2:47 AM. I was driving home through the sleeping town...

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The Hollow Bell Farm

In the autumn of 1987, my cousin Marcus and I drove out to the old Hollow Bell Farm, a place that locals had whispered about for decades. The farm sat...

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The Hush of the Clockwork Bird

In the autumn of my ninth year, my family moved into a dilapidated Victorian house on the edge of a dying town called Verloren. The house itself was a relic,...

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The Weight of Sealed Doors

I first noticed the pattern about a week after we moved into the old Pierce house, a creaking skeleton of timber and nails that had stood since 1932. Every time...

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The Third-Floor Watcher

I have always been attuned to the strange and unseen. From childhood, I sensed things others dismissed, and by my early thirties, I had accepted that the world was layered...

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The Kitchen Light Dims

Two years ago, my husband Mark and I moved with our two children into a converted apartment building on the outskirts of a small Ohio town. The building had once...

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The Hollow Paintings

I was seven when we moved into the old farmhouse on Marrow Lane, a crooked, two-story structure with peeling white paint and a roof that sagged like a tired spine....

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The Juniper Gate

The summer I turned nine, my father’s failing hardware business forced us to uproot from the flat plains of Kansas to the humid, pine-choked hills of northern Alabama. The moving...

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The Headless Wanderer

I’m a teenager, but what I’m about to tell you isn’t a lie or a joke. I take ghost hunting very seriously, and this story still gives me chills every...

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The Painted Door

The summer of 2004 in the small town of Meridian, Ohio, was stifling, the kind of heat that made the air thick and the cicadas scream. My mother had just...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

The old lighthouse on Porphyry Point had been abandoned for decades, but the town of Greyharbor still told stories about the keeper who vanished with his daughter in the winter...

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The Tenant’s Ledger

Four months before I abandoned the crumbling walk-up on Meridian Avenue, around the first week of April in 1994, I was returning from my sister’s place in the suburbs. It...

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The Still-Locked Pantry

The summer of ’79 was a furnace, and I was nineteen, broke, and desperate enough to take any job that paid under the table. My friend Dwayne and I had...

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The Mantle of Sleep

In the autumn of 2004, a young mother named Elena moved into a drafty farmhouse on the edge of a small town called Ashford. The house had been vacant for...

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The Salt Wind and the Dead

It was the summer of 1981, and I was riding my old Schwinn down the long, rusted span of the Calumet Bridge, which arched over the murky waters of the...

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