Ghost stories from Oklahoma

The Glass Water

I never believed in precognition, not really. I was a skeptic who liked patterns, not prophecies. But the dream I had in late March 2023 shook me. I was standing...

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The Hollow Rabbit

I’m not sure why I’m writing this. Maybe because if I don’t, the silence in this house will swallow me whole. My name is Daniel, I’m thirty-four, and I live...

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The Ceramic Sink

The house on Bramble Lane was older than the realtor had admitted, closer to half a century, and its bones creaked with the weight of years. My husband, Daniel, and...

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A Late Night Visit

I was just reading, ” A sea of voices in the night” by Ant 1111. You know, that story brings back a memory of something that happened when I was...

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The Hollow Laugh

The evening had started with a sense of reckless freedom, the kind that comes with the last Friday before finals. I was in my cramped dorm, a converted basement on...

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The Red Door on Vantage Road

I was barely seventeen when I traded the endless flatlands of Kansas for the shrouded hills of coastal Maine. My father had taken a job as a caretaker for a...

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The Null Above the Cut

In the late autumn of 1995, I was a night-shift security guard at the Pine Hollow Dam, a massive concrete structure that loomed over the Blackwater River gorge in the...

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The Caretaker’s Ledger

The first thing I noticed about the house on Hemlock Lane was the way the porch light flickered, as if it were breathing. We’d moved in three weeks ago, escaping...

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The Glass Creek Remedy

My grandmother used to say that our blood carried the river’s memory, that we were born with the current in our veins. I never understood that until I was nine,...

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The Photograph at the End of the Hall

My name is Mara, and I am fourteen. This is what happened in the summer before my freshman year. We were at my grandmother’s farmhouse in the Missouri Ozarks, the...

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The Last Tarantella

The summer solstice was a week gone, and the heat had settled into the Arkansas backwoods like a sickness. I was hauling a load of antique furniture from a dead...

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The Painted Veil

The first time I saw the thing in our apartment, I blamed it on the poor lighting and my exhaustion from working the night shift at the 24-hour grocery on...

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The Train in the Field

In the summer of 1998, I was twelve and sent to stay with my Aunt Mara in the remote town of Culver’s Bend, nestled among the cornfields of Nebraska. Aunt...

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The Occupant of Bed 14

I never thought I’d find myself in this situation, but here I am, spending my nights at the Hillcrest Rest Home. I’m a night nurse, and I’ve been on this...

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The Mannequin in the Hall

The old farmhouse on Cinder Lane had always felt like a living thing, its floorboards groaning like tired bones, its walls sweating cold drafts in the summer. We’d moved there...

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The Marigold Grave

I am forty-two, and my two sons, Elias and Julian, are seventeen. We had come to rural Vermont because my father, Harold, had suffered a stroke and lay in a...

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The Ceiling’s Arithmetic

My cousin Lena and I were sprawled on the floor of my new apartment, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes and the smell of old wood. It was the top floor of...

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The Knocking Code

I’m fifteen, and for the past two years, my bedroom has been a stage for something I can’t explain. We live in a drafty old farmhouse on the outskirts of...

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The Porcelain Passenger

The first time I met the Gentleman, I was six years old, and I had just died for the first time. We lived in a rusty trailer at the edge...

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The Linen Closet Guest

When I inherited my great-aunt Mabel’s farmhouse in the dusty Nebraska plains, I knew I wasn’t just getting a house. I was getting a legacy of oddities. My mother used...

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The Muddy Hollow

In our housing tract, a concrete drainage channel cut through the center, a scar of gray against the green lawns. It was our shortcut, our secret highway, where we’d walk...

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The Cobalt Afterimage

In the autumn of that year, my brother Leo and I were in the den of our rented farmhouse, watching an old VHS tape of a forgotten horror film. The...

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The Pinwheel Tape

The first time I heard the pinwheel, I was in the basement of the old Kessler house, cataloging boxes for a law firm that had no business keeping them. The...

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The Counter’s Burden

At twelve, I thought I understood the rules of our small apartment on the third floor of a building that smelled of boiled cabbage and old paint. The kitchen was...

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