Ghost stories from Oklahoma

The Last Light in Larkspur Lane

The summer I turned eleven, we moved into the old Hargrove house on Larkspur Lane. It was a sprawling Victorian with a wraparound porch and a turret that looked like...

Read Story →

The Last Light in Aldergate

I was twelve when we moved to the old mill town of Aldergate, tucked into a valley where the sun seemed to set an hour early. Our house, a sagging...

Read Story →

The Fraction of a Second

The house on Marrow Lane sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, its paint peeling like sunburned skin. We’d moved in three months ago, and I still hadn’t unpacked half...

Read Story →

The Candle That Knew

My husband and I had been fighting for two hours, our words sharp as broken glass, until finally he muttered something about needing air and stalked off to the living...

Read Story →

The Last Harvest

The craving hit me like a fever in the dead of night, a sudden, inexplicable need to hear my mother’s voice. It wasn’t the usual Sunday call—we’d been estranged since...

Read Story →

The Garden of Forgotten Things

My mother, Clara, bought the old farmhouse on Maple Hollow Road three autumns ago. It was a creaking, drafty place with peeling wallpaper and a cellar that smelled of damp...

Read Story →

The Lantern-Bearer on Chalk Ridge

I grew up in the dusty town of Marrow, perched on a bluff above the Cimarron River, a place that had once been a mission for wayward boys. By the...

Read Story →

The River’s Gift

I had always been a skeptic, scoffing at ghost stories as the product of overactive imaginations. To me, the paranormal was for the gullible, a thrill for those who wanted...

Read Story →

The Mimic of the Cottonwood

When my husband and I moved back to my childhood home in the dusty town of Red Hollow, I thought I knew every creak and groan the old farmhouse had...

Read Story →

The Unwound Hour

My father bought a music box for my mother on a trip to Prague, twenty-two years ago. It was a delicate thing, a black lacquered sphere with a brass ballerina...

Read Story →

The Salt on the Windowsill

Our rental was a two-story farmhouse at the end of a gravel lane, surrounded by cornfields that turned to brown stubble by October. I’d known the previous owners, the Millers—nice...

Read Story →

The Wardrobe’s Visitor

I was seven when we moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of Maplewood, a town that seemed to exist only in the gray space between cornfields and forgotten...

Read Story →

The Clock That Wakes

When Mira and her six-year-old son, Leo, moved into the old farmhouse on Cedar Lane, she told herself the creaks and groans were just the wind and the house settling....

Read Story →

The Photographer’s Impulse

The first flash came on a Saturday, when the afternoon sun poured through the living room windows like honey. I was crossing the hall from the kitchen, balancing a cup...

Read Story →

The Stovetop Gaze

It was the summer I turned thirteen, the year my parents sent me and my little sister, Maggie, to stay with our great-aunt Edna in her old farmhouse outside of...

Read Story →

The Unfolding Hush

When I was nine, we lived in a cramped apartment above a laundromat that never seemed to close. The machines below churned and thumped, a mechanical heartbeat that dulled the...

Read Story →

The Hollow Frame

We’d been in the new apartment for three months when my father’s great-aunt passed away. The only thing she left us was a bunk bed, a heavy oak monstrosity with...

Read Story →

The Grackle in the Wall

Three weeks after I moved into the converted carriage house on Maplewood Avenue, I started seeing a shape. It was never more than a flicker—a dark, crumpled blob, like a...

Read Story →

The Cold Spots in the Corn

My earliest memories are of a place that felt less like home and more like a waiting room for something terrible. We lived in a double-wide on the edge of...

Read Story →

The Carousel of December

I never believed in ghosts, not really. I was a skeptic, a scientist, a man who dealt in facts and measurable phenomena. My name is Dr. Elias Vance, and I’m...

Read Story →

The Chalk Sun

The day we moved into the house on Meridian Lane, I found a child’s drawing taped to the inside of the fuse box. It showed a stick figure family under...

Read Story →

The Room with No Door

My grandmother’s farmhouse in the rolling hills of eastern Kentucky was a place where time seemed to blur. Dust motes danced in the afternoon sun that slanted through the warped...

Read Story →

The Floorboard Cipher

In the autumn of 1983, I was a junior at Radcliffe, but my bank account had other ideas. So, I took a babysitting gig for a wealthy couple, the Ashworths,...

Read Story →

The Static in the Corn

My name is Elara, and I come from a small farming town in the heart of Nebraska, a place called Hollow Creek. We didn’t have much, but we had land,...

Read Story →