Ghost stories from Ohio

The Curl of the Cistern

Every Saturday, Mira woke before dawn to tame her stubbornly straight hair. The apartment’s only mirror that wasn’t fogged or cracked hung in the laundry room, above a chipped porcelain...

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The Lantern’s Last Flicker

The house on Maple Street had been in Elena’s family for generations, its walls soaked in memories both sweet and strange. Elena’s cousin, Mira, shared her obsession with the supernatural,...

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The Weeping Cistern

In the dusty attic of the old Brinewell County Home, now a museum of faded photographs and rusted tools, I found the recording equipment. I was cataloging the artifacts for...

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The Hat Man of Hollow Creek

My name is Caleb, and I’m thirteen. Last summer, my family moved to this tiny, godforsaken town called Hollow Creek, right before I started eighth grade. The house was old,...

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The Tin Box

The recorder sat on the cracked marble of the oldest grave, a small black rectangle against the moss. I’d been here before, of course. The place wasn’t much—a dozen stones...

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The Cold Recital

In the hollow of November, when the leaves had turned to brittle brown and the wind carried the first bite of frost, Margaret Avery found herself standing at the edge...

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The Hollow Between the Pines

It had been eleven months since my mother passed, and in that time, I had grown inseparable from Lena, a girl whose idea of fun was to see how close...

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The Cartographer of Hushed Rooms

The reason I’m committing this to paper is a need to confess, to lay bare the truth to a blank page since every living ear has proven deaf or hostile....

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The Hour of the Unraveled Thread

Mara stirred awake in her cramped attic bedroom, the low ceiling pressing down like a held breath. The digital clock on her nightstand glowed 5:17 AM. A faint, sickly light...

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The Hum of the Mound

The house had a way of breathing that I never quite got used to. It stood on the highest ridge in Greer County, a lonely sentinel against the sky, as...

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The Cold Draft in the Linen Closet

I’ve lived in the hollows of Pemberton, Vermont, for nearly thirty years, ever since I married into the family that owns the old farmhouse on Birch Hill. It’s a house...

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The Marrow of the Mill

My return from the high desert of New Mexico was meant to be a quiet one, a chance to clear my head after months of smoke and ash. I drove...

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The Static Between Heartbeats

In the autumn of 2018, I moved into a refurbished Victorian house on the edge of Ironwood, a town known for its old mills and lingering fog. The house had...

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The Drawer Ritual

I was fifteen when my mother decided we’d move to the old farmhouse outside of Julian, a town so small the map might as well have swallowed it. The house...

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The Hollow Staircase

We moved from a cramped flat above a fishmonger’s shop to a tall, narrow house that leaned slightly to the left, as if tired of standing. The walls were covered...

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The Marble Ledger

The autumn of 2008 had stripped the oaks bare, and the old cemetery on the hill—the one locals called the Marble Ledger—seemed to hunch under a sky the color of...

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The 1910 Class Portrait

The call came at 6:47 AM, a time when the hospital corridors were still quiet, save for the distant clatter of breakfast trays. I was in my office, reviewing charts,...

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The Static Between Us

The old lighthouse on Marrow Point had been abandoned for decades, but the new owners, a couple named Dana and Ellis, saw it as a charming fixer-upper. They moved in...

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The Folded Map

Marta had always considered herself a rational woman. A retired librarian, she spent her days cataloging her late husband’s belongings and tending to her overgrown garden. But after his death,...

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The Papery Rasp of Fading Tape

The reels of magnetic tape were my grandfather’s legacy, and they became my obsession. He had spent his final years in a farmhouse in the Finger Lakes region of New...

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The Late Call

I’ve spent years chasing whispers in graveyards, my digital recorder always at the ready. If a location didn’t yield results, I’d find a cemetery. At least four nights a week,...

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The Mannequin in the Orchard

In the late summer of 2001, I rented a small cottage on the outskirts of a town called Millbrook, nestled against the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The property...

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The Unseen Resident

When my cousin Tyler and his older brother Max were forced to move into the attic room of our grandmother’s old farmhouse, they thought it was just a dusty, creepy...

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The Night the Intercom Crackled

I had been working the overnight shift at the Meridian Peak Sanatorium for just over three months. The place was a converted tuberculosis hospital from the 1920s, now a long-term...

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