Ghost stories from Oregon

The Amber Visitor

I never believed in the stories the old-timers told about Maple Hollow. They spoke of lights in the woods, of things that didn’t belong. I figured they were just trying...

Read Story →

The Midnight Habits of Room 14

I woke up at 6:57 AM on a Tuesday, which was odd because I was sure I had set my alarm for 6:45. The clock on the nightstand glowed 6:45,...

Read Story →

The Bell at the Yellow Gate

My childhood summers were spent at my grandparents’ farm in the rolling hills of southern Indiana. The old farmhouse sat at the end of a long gravel drive, guarded by...

Read Story →

The Cinder Dress

Before the fire, Mara had thought of the antique store as a sanctuary, a place where time itself seemed to slow and gather dust. She worked there, cataloging the forgotten...

Read Story →

The Curator’s Warning

The university library was a cathedral of silence, its towering shelves of ancient tomes casting long, skeletal shadows across the worn carpet. Mira sat at a scarred oak table, her...

Read Story →

The Glass Marble on the Brass Tray

I’d inherited the farmhouse from my great-aunt, a rambling Victorian relic with dusty rooms and creaking floorboards. It was the kind of place you expected to feel eyes on you,...

Read Story →

The Long-Faced Visitor

I’ve spent forty years as a night attendant at the old St. Dymphna’s Convalescent Home, a rambling brick building perched on a cliff above the churning gray sea. The wind...

Read Story →

The Carved Counter

In the autumn of 2016, I was house-sitting for my uncle in his old farmhouse on the outskirts of a small town. The house had been in the family for...

Read Story →

The Cinnamon Scent of Passage

In the autumn of 1999, I had taken a job as a stock clerk at the St. Agatha’s Mission, a sprawling, sandstone edifice that huddled in the old industrial quarter...

Read Story →

The Constant Gaze

I grew up in a house that breathed with secrets. It was a tall, narrow Victorian on Maple Street, with peeling paint and a wraparound porch that creaked in the...

Read Story →

The Hollow Road

The first sign that we’d made a wrong turn wasn’t the absence of streetlights, though that was unsettling enough. It was the sudden, profound silence when we rolled down the...

Read Story →

The Grain of the Wall

We moved into the old farmhouse in the middle of a Nebraska cornfield in the fall of 2018. The previous owner had left a lot of old furniture and a...

Read Story →

The Second Curtain Call

My name is Cora, and I grew up in the small town of Ash Hollow, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s the kind of place where...

Read Story →

The Stain That Never Dried

The summer I turned seventeen, I was stuck at my grandmother’s farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska. My cousin Dale had come to stay for a few weeks, and...

Read Story →

The Hollow Between Heartbeats

The Martins’ house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, its wood siding weathered to a dull gray, and its windows like empty eyes. I was there with my best...

Read Story →

The Clockwork Hum of the Kitchen

The day my father’s ashes arrived in a cardboard box, I was twenty-nine and had just moved into a tiny apartment above a bakery in a town called Grayhaven. The...

Read Story →

The Lantern in the Parlor

I was six when we moved into the old Croft house on Marrow Lane, a sprawling Victorian relic that had stood empty for decades. My parents, ever the optimists, saw...

Read Story →

The Snare and the Stag

The air in the Siuslaw National Forest carried the smell of damp earth and pine, but underneath it, something acrid—like burnt sugar and old copper—clung to the back of my...

Read Story →

The Laminated Hymn

The sanctuary of the First United Methodist Church in Hebbronville, Texas, had a peculiar smell that Sunday morning: a mix of old hymnals, lemon polish, and the faint, sweet odor...

Read Story →

The Moth-Keeper’s Ledger

In the autumn of that year, my cousin Lena and I accepted a job from our friend’s aunt, Mrs. Calloway, to ready her late husband’s estate for sale. The property...

Read Story →

The Hollow Below the Stairs

In the autumn of 1998, I moved with my partner, Edgar, and our nine-month-old daughter, Delia, into a crumbling Victorian house on the outskirts of a town called Merrow. The...

Read Story →

The Weight of Unseen Threads

Elara had always been a weaver of sorts, not of cloth, but of the invisible. She could feel the static of a room’s mood, the cold breath of a passing...

Read Story →

The Basin’s Lament

The house on Bellweather Lane was a tired, salt-bleached Victorian that had weathered a century of coastal storms. My mother, my father, and I lived with my grandfather, a retired...

Read Story →

The Hand Dryer Manifesto

In the late autumn of 1994, I took a clerical position at the State Office Complex in Des Moines, Iowa. The building, known as the Meridian, was a relic from...

Read Story →