Ghost stories from Ohio

The Tin Rattle

The rain had been falling for three days straight, a steady, gray drizzle that turned the streets of Meridian into a slick mirror. In the old Morse Building, where I...

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The Cold Line

It was the summer I turned fifteen, and my cousin Marcus, his two friends, and I had snuck out to the old railroad bridge that crossed the dried-up riverbed on...

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The Copper Omen

The last time I saw my grandfather alive, he was sitting in his worn leather chair, staring out the window at the pine forest that bordered our property. He didn’t...

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The Watcher at the Foot of the Bed

When I was nine, my parents split and I became a suitcase kid, shuffling between my mother’s cramped apartment and my father’s sterile townhouse. Making friends was a lost cause;...

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Daylight Phantom Hiker

My friends and I used to go hiking and camping every spring and summer, in an area known as the Bacon Woods. We had a number of odd events happen...

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The Bell at the Back Stairs

Twenty years have passed, but I still can’t shake the memory of that summer in the old three-story walk-up on Henley Street, in the heart of Millbrook. I was the...

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The Crayon Epitaph

The house on Maple Hollow Lane was my grandmother’s pride, a two-story Victorian with a wraparound porch and a garden that bled color in the spring. It had been built...

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The Dust Settles

My great-aunt Edna had a sixth sense for the spectral, or so the family whispered. She’d never stay in one house longer than a year, always citing ‘the draft’ or...

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The Lantern Road Standoff

The last chord of the final slow dance hung in the air like a held breath, and then the gymnasium lights flickered on, harsh and unforgiving. Mira and I stumbled...

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The Farmhouse on Hollow Creek Road

I’ve kept this to myself for over two decades. It’s the kind of thing that festers in the back of your mind, surfacing in quiet moments, a splinter you can’t...

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The Locked Room at the End of the Hall

In the summer I turned nine, we moved into my grandmother’s house at the end of a crumbling gravel road. The house had been in our family since before the...

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The Gate in the Maize

The old Harlow farm sat at the edge of a vast cornfield, its clapboard walls gray with age and its porch sagging like a tired spine. In the summer of...

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The Stonemason’s Block

In the autumn of my tenth year, my family moved into a sprawling, drafty house at the edge of a town that seemed to be slowly sinking into the surrounding...

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The Rag Man on Whitstable Lane

I must have been four, maybe five, the summer we stayed with Aunt Margery in her creaking Victorian house on Whitstable Lane. The house smelled of mothballs and dust, and...

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The Coffin in the Basement

Marta had always been the pragmatic one in her family. When she inherited her great-uncle’s decaying farmhouse in the Appalachian foothills, she saw it as a burden, not a blessing....

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