Ghost stories from Oklahoma

The Shade of the Iron Oak

From the time I could toddle, I knew the house breathed. Not with lungs, but with a slow, creaking rhythm that pulsed through the walls and floorboards. My grandmother called...

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The Night the Kettle Screamed

I’ve always seen them—the ones who slipped between seconds. Granny called it ‘the sight,’ but it felt less like a gift and more like a curse. Our house, a sagging...

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The Grackle’s Stare

I’ve never been one to believe in the supernatural. Ghosts, spirits, that sort of thing—I always chalked it up to overactive imaginations. But then we moved into the old farmhouse...

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The Shelf of Small Things

Carl and Marge had been in the old farmhouse for five years now, fixing it up piece by piece. It was a sprawling place with a wrap-around porch and a...

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The Man Who Smelled of Rain

I have always been able to see the dead. It is a gift I never asked for, a curse that follows me from town to town. So when I packed...

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Oklahoma City Ghosts Part 1

I started to ask my daughter about Robert because after that dream of mine I started to think that this Robert business was something more frightening. I asked who Robert...

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Oklahoma City Ghosts Part 2

My husband had to be at work at 5:30 in the morning and there were times I stayed up and there was times I went back to sleep. The nights...

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The Tallyman’s Notice

The first time I saw it was on a Tuesday, the kind of overcast morning that makes the world look like a faded photograph. I was stopped at the intersection...

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The Lantern in the Rain

The evening had a weight to it, the kind that presses on the chest before a storm. I sat cross-legged on the cold floor of my apartment, the radiator ticking...

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The Stained Glass Promise

I never believed in omens, not really. But the day the stained glass window in our new house cracked, I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the...

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The Latch That Clicked

In the late autumn of 1978, I found myself couch-surfing at my old friend’s place in a dusty corner of New Mexico. My band had just broken up, and my...

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The Lantern’s Indifferent Glow

The old lighthouse stood on a jagged spit of land, its beam a weary eye sweeping the churning gray sea. Elara had come here seeking solitude, a retreat from a...

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The Aquarium at the Top of the Stairs

My name is Marcus, and I’m sixty-two now, but the summer I turned twelve, my family moved into a house that had been standing for over a century. It was...

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The Man in the Mirror Tiles

I remember the summer I turned eight, the summer my mother sent me to stay with my father and his new wife in the arid sprawl of Nevada. My father,...

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The Fifth Floor Static

Mara had always been a lightning rod for the dead. As a child, she’d see them standing at the foot of her bed, their mouths moving in silent, frantic speech....

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The Cold Recital

It was late November, and I was staying over at my friend Marcus’s place in the sleepy town of Red Bluff, California. His church, the First Reformed Fellowship, was holding...

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The Last House on Red Clay Road

My grandfather built the place before the war, when the only sounds were wind through the pines and the occasional cry of a loon on the marsh. He was a...

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The Salt and the Silverfish

The last place had been a nightmare. Tiny, silent, everywhere—in the mattress seams, in the toaster, in the creases of our clothes. We’d wake up with bites that swelled into...

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The Dirt Under the Porch

I’d been away from the forum for six years, lurking like a ghost in the digital graveyard of forgotten accounts. Life had pulled me away—job, moving, the slow decay of...

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The Cartographer’s Dust

Retired detective Mara Voss had spent thirty years chasing the tangible, the logical, the provable. She had stared down gang leaders, faced down serial killers, and walked through crime scenes...

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The Last Scent of Lavender

In November of 2019, Nana Eliza passed away. She was my husband’s maternal grandmother, a woman who had lived in the same creaky farmhouse on the outskirts of a small,...

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The Unwound Reel

The house on Cedar Lane was my grandmother’s, a creaking, drafty Victorian that my husband, Leo, and I inherited after she passed. We moved in last autumn, and with the...

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The Last Puff of Winter

In the frozen heart of February 2019, in a small town nestled against the Rockies, my sister Clara lay in a hospice bed, her breath a ragged whisper. She had...

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The Grain Elevator’s Guest

In the fall of 1994, I moved into a small apartment in the shadow of the old grain elevator in Hays, Kansas. The building was drafty, but cheap, and it...

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