Ghost stories from Oregon

The Marble of the Deep

Five years ago, I was part of a folklore society that met in an old, musty library. During one of our meetings, I noticed a small, unassuming box on a...

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The Deliberate Knots

It was around our third year in the old house that I noticed the change. At first, it was just small things—a misplaced book, a door left ajar that we...

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The Jade Return

After the move, I thought I’d left the unease behind—the way the old house would sigh at night, the cold spots that followed me from room to room, the feeling...

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The Stain of November

The last week of October in Cedar Falls, Iowa, had been unseasonably warm, but that afternoon the air turned sharp and thin, as if the sky itself was holding its...

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The Shifting Loam

When my partner and I found the listing for a farmhouse on the edge of the Cranberry Bog, we thought we’d stumbled onto a miracle. The rent was a fraction...

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The Stitch in the Static

The rain had been falling for three days straight, a gray curtain that blurred the edges of the world beyond my kitchen window. I was in the middle of washing...

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The Whirling Stillness

The noise had been a part of our lives for weeks before I bothered to wonder about it. It came from the garage, a low, rhythmic hum that was barely...

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The Hollow Hour

Marta had always prided herself on being a light sleeper, attuned to every creak and sigh of their old farmhouse. But when her thirteen-year-old daughter, Elara, began waking at precisely...

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The Clockwork Door

I had worked the night desk at the Blackwood Inn for fourteen years, ever since my husband passed and I needed something to fill the long, quiet hours. The inn,...

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The Stone Rehearsal

Mara had always felt things others couldn’t. It wasn’t a gift, exactly; more like a constant low hum of other people’s emotions, and sometimes, the residue of places. She’d learned...

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The Ledger of Unpaid Debts

When my friend Diego offered me a place to stay, I didn’t hesitate. His 82-year-old grandmother, Rosa, lived alone in a sprawling four-story house her late husband, Emilio, had built....

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The Flicker in the Fuse Box

Maya first noticed the pattern in the autumn of 2019, right after she and her partner, Leo, moved into a renovated Victorian in the historic district of Asheville, North Carolina....

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The Last Broadcast

It was the autumn of 1998, and I was seventeen, a senior at Hollow Creek High, a school so small that the entire senior class could fit in one homeroom....

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The Weight of Air in Room 14

Our new apartment was supposed to be a fresh start. After years of city noise, the quiet suburb of Maplewood promised peace. The building was older, a converted Victorian house...

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The Last Unit

My family moved into the last unit of a new development on the outskirts of a city that had recently swallowed a forest. The realtors had shown it to at...

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The Glass Wardens

The first thing I noticed about the house on Hemlock Lane was the stained-glass window at the end of the upstairs hallway. It showed two figures, one tall and one...

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The Bottle Top Harvest

In the early aughts, I landed in a rambling Victorian in the Verdugo district of Los Angeles, a neighborhood that had once been a Mexican barrio before the city redrew...

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The Orchard’s Debt

I’m not much for telling tales, and I hate folks who spin yarns for attention. But this happened, plain and simple. In 2003, my mom and stepdad bought a house...

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The Neon Architect’s Gift

In the late ’90s, I worked the evening shift at the Vault, a cinema carved into the underside of a towering office block in downtown Calgary. The old Rialto had...

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The Lavender Visitor

My grandmother’s farmhouse had always been a place of quiet solitude, a refuge from the chaos of the city. After her passing, I inherited it, along with the heavy silence...

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The December Gate

The year I turned thirty, I inherited my grandmother’s house on the edge of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. It was a two-story Victorian with a wraparound porch, and it...

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The Last Encore

At the tail end of 2007, we drove up to a wedding outside of Asheville, North Carolina. Our friends Marcus and Elena were tying the knot in a restored barn...

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The Corn Singer

The first time I heard it, I was six, lying in my narrow bed in the upstairs room of the gray farmhouse my parents rented from my uncle. The window...

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The Worn Key

In the autumn of 2016, my partner, Dana, and I signed a lease for a ground-floor apartment in an old brownstone in Washington, D.C. The building had been converted from...

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