Ghost stories from Oregon

The Bone Fence

The package arrived on a Tuesday, wrapped in brown paper and smelling faintly of cedar and dust. I was sorting through the mail when my daughter, Clara, now seven, tugged...

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The Hollow Seat

Marta had always been a collector of small anxieties. She catalogued them like pressed flowers: the thrum of a crowded room, the prick of a needle, the suffocating weight of...

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The Night the Floorboards Remembered

Eight months had passed since we moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the marsh. My younger brother and I were camped out on the pull-out sofa in...

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The Flicker in Room 14

I was fourteen when we moved into the old Draven House, a rambling Victorian that had been split into three apartments. My mother, my younger brother, and I took the...

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The Cellar of Static

My name is Lena, and I’m thirty-one now, but the year I turned twenty-six, I learned that the world has teeth. I was a skeptic, the kind who needs to...

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The Lamplighter’s Glimpse

At twenty-six, Mara had built her life on the bedrock of reason. She was a lab technician, a woman who trusted in the visible and the measurable. Her childhood home,...

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The Lantern Man of Millbrook

I grew up in a house where beliefs were as mismatched as my family’s holiday dinners. My mother, a staunch materialist, ran a small residential care home for adults with...

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The Salt-Glass Window

The summer I turned seven, my mother packed our lives into four suitcases and a cardboard box of photo albums. We left the dry, flat streets of Salt Lake City...

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The Ledger of Unfinished Lines

Aunt Helena’s house always smelled of mothballs and old paper. When I was seven, my father would drop me off for a week each summer at her Victorian home in...

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The Lantern List

The summer I turned nine, we moved to a borrowed cottage on the edge of the Thornwood Cemetery. It wasn’t a real town, just a handful of houses clustered around...

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The Hollow Below

In the autumn of 2009, I moved into a crumbling Victorian house with my fiancé, Elias. We had been drawn to it by the low price and the promise of...

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The Weight of Static

I never believed in ghosts the way my brother did. He’d spend hours in the library, poring over books about spectral phenomena, his eyes wide with a hunger I found...

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The Marrow Garden

The summer I turned seven, we left the cramped apartment in Bakersfield for a sprawling property in the hills of western Virginia. My father, a traveling pharmaceutical rep, had landed...

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The Hollow in the Hemlocks

Bascom and his younger brother, Eben, were driving up to a secluded fishing spot called Widow’s Creek, tucked deep in the hills beyond the old ironworks. The summer air was...

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The Third Conflagration

The late summer air was thick with the scent of pine and dust when Elias and I first saw the light. We were ten, sprawled on the worn floral couch...

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The Cello’s Silence

The old Grunewald Concert Hall squatted at the edge of the city like a great, gray toad. Its red brick was darkened by a century of soot, and its arched...

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The Dead of Winter

The first time we visited the old Barlow Estate was on a dare, but the second time was for answers. My friend Jenna had moved to a small town called...

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The Concrete Hollow

The night air was brittle with frost, and the streetlights cast long, oily pools on the cracked pavement. I was buckling my youngest, Theo, into his car seat after a...

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The Hollow Box

Back about seven years ago, I started noticing small things falling out of place. My daughters would sit at breakfast, their eyes darting to corners, and whisper that they felt...

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The Morning the Apartment Breathed

The first thing I noticed was the silence. Not the ordinary quiet of a Sunday morning, but a thick, cottony hush that seemed to swallow the hum of the refrigerator...

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The Salt Tray and the Empty Chair

I was thirteen the summer my parents packed me off to my great-aunt’s bed-and-breakfast in the high desert of New Mexico. The place was called the Adobe Rose, a sprawling,...

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The Stoneman’s Posture

It was the first Tuesday of September, the kind of evening when the heat clung to the bricks like a second skin. My rented cottage sat at the edge of...

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The Clockmaker’s Debt

The first time I saw the man in the brass spectacles, I was eleven, on a sweltering July afternoon in the attic of my grandmother’s house in Julien, a town...

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The Cartographer’s Hobby

Elara rented the small, top-floor apartment in the old Verlaine building, drawn by its immense arched windows that faced the river. The previous tenants had left behind curious remnants: a...

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