Ghost stories from Oregon

The Sunlit Children

I moved into the old Hargrove house in late spring, drawn by its high ceilings and the way the afternoon light poured through the tall windows in the front parlor....

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The Lamp by the Window

My first encounter with the thing that wore my grandmother’s face happened on a Tuesday, three days after we moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the salt...

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The Loam-Brown Visitor

The old farmhouse in Grey Hollow had always been a place of quiet unease, but I’d never seen anything like that. It was the summer of my twenty-eighth year, and...

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The Hollow Light

I was nine when I first noticed that the night didn’t feel like night. It felt like a held breath. Our house sat on the edge of a salt marsh,...

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The Floor Ticks

The first time I noticed the ticks, I was six, sitting cross-legged on the cold linoleum of the kitchen in my aunt’s old farmhouse. It was late autumn, and the...

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The Static in the Walls

The first time I noticed something was wrong wasn’t the night we moved in, or the first time the heater clicked on with a groan that sounded almost human. It...

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The Cartographer of Unfinished Hallways

I have always seen the places where the world forgets to finish itself. As a child, I thought the long corridor behind our apartment’s boiler room was just a storage...

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The Weight of Unseen Steps

I had just finished my nightly ritual—brushing my teeth, checking the locks, and pulling the curtains tight—when I heard it: a low, grinding drag across the ceiling above my bedroom....

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The Lantern in the Juniper

When my partner, Mira, moved from the coast to the high desert to live with me, we converted the spare room—the one that faced the eastern yard—into our shared study....

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The Stairwell That Breathed

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. My grandmother used to say I had the sight, but I always thought she was just an old woman telling stories to a...

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The Man in the Blue Chair

We moved to the old farmhouse in early autumn, when the leaves were turning and the fields were full of dry, whispering corn. I was twelve, and my sisters, Becca...

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The Frozen Chorus

Marlene and I had been in the new apartment for barely a month, still unpacking boxes and learning the quirks of the place. It was a nondescript complex in a...

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The Chalk Door

I was twenty-six when my parents bought the old Ferris place up on Marrow Lane. I told myself the move meant a clean slate, that the things I’d seen as...

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The Empty Hutch

The farmhouse had always breathed with a rhythm of its own, a gentle exhale of settling timbers and the faint creak of the porch swing in the wind. For nine...

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The Glass Marble

I remember the day we moved into the old Victorian on Maple Street. The realtor had warned us about the creaking floors and the drafty windows, but I felt nothing—no...

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A Cold Spot in the Attic

I’ve always been the kind of person who notices the small things—the way the floorboards creak in a certain spot, the way the air gets heavy in a room before...

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The Key That Fits the Other Lock

I live in a modest cottage on the outskirts of a small town in the Midwest, where the fields stretch flat and the sky seems to press down on the...

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The Concrete Garden

In the sprawling suburban sprawl of Mesa, Arizona, where the sun bleached the sky to a pale yellow and the heat shimmered like a mirage on every street, I grew...

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The Last Grocer’s Ledger

This happened about eight months ago, just before the troubles with my wife began to ease. It’s a brief tale, but it has lingered in my mind because of its...

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The Persistent Itch

The first time I noticed it was the summer I moved into the old farmhouse on Eider Lane. My aunt had left it to me in her will, a crumbling...

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The Quilted Breath

Six years have passed since I first stepped into the old farmhouse on Redwick Lane, but the cold of that place still clings to my bones. I met a man...

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The Stairwell That Wasn’t There

I was nine the summer we moved to the edge of Harlow County, where the pines grow so thick they swallow the daylight. My aunt’s house sat at the end...

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The Inventory of Empty Rooms

When I was nine, my family moved from the dry plains of Lubbock, Texas, to a dusty little town called Red Mesa, New Mexico. I didn’t think much of the...

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The Sixth Chair

I’ve always been drawn to the strange, even as a child. My grandmother used to say I had the ‘sight,’ but I just thought the world was more interesting than...

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