Ghost stories from Pennsylvania

The Sunken Orchard

Before my family moved to the arid plains of western Texas, we spent a summer in my great-aunt’s crumbling farmhouse in the Louisiana bayou. I was thirteen, restless, and convinced...

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The Grease Stain

My wife, Carla, and I bought the old Dombrowski house for a steal, and we knew why when we moved in. The place smelled like a deep fryer that had...

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The Salt Loom

Six years ago, when I was twelve, my father sent me to my room without supper for talking back at the dinner table. Our house sat at the edge of...

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The Copper Dial

I’ve been a night watchman at the Derleth Museum of Natural History for nearly a decade, a place more famous for its dusty taxidermy and moth-eaten tapestries than any real...

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The Hollow Board

My grandmother warned me about the board before she died, clutched my hand with papery fingers and said, ‘Nadia, it isn’t a toy. It’s a door, and some doors should...

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The Pine Needle Cat

I was house-sitting for my aunt in her isolated cabin in the Appalachian foothills, a two-hour drive from the nearest town. She had gone to visit her sister in Canada,...

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The Blue Dish

My father and I moved into the flat above his new fish-and-chip shop in the damp, grey town of Whitby, England. The building was old, with creaking timbers and a...

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The Apron in the Hollow

I was seven the summer we moved to my grandmother’s farmhouse after she passed. My mother, a nurse, worked nights, so I slept in the big bed with my father,...

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The Cardinal in the Attic

I grew up in a town where the autumn leaves fell like blood drops, and the old Victorian on Maple Street had a history that clung to its walls like...

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The Tin Token

I’ve been a volunteer at the Ogden Hollow Transportation Museum for three years now. It’s a converted railway depot from the 1880s, all worn brick and creaking timber, and the...

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The Painted Door of Room 14

I remember the first time I stepped into the old dormitory on the edge of the university campus. It was a red-brick building, crumbling at the corners, with ivy crawling...

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The Rusted Key

My mother and I were peeling potatoes at the kitchen counter of her new apartment, the small radio humming a tune she claimed was her favorite but I’d never heard...

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The Borrowed Hands

The first time I noticed something wrong with the apartment on Meridian Street, I was eight years old. We’d moved in three weeks prior, and Mom had finally gotten around...

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The Stitcher’s Visit

My mother drowned when I was four, a boating accident on Lake Merrow that the police called a freak wave. I have two daughters now, and I’ve never spoken of...

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The Root Cellar’s Bargain

The house on Hemlock Lane had always felt like a living thing to me, its wooden bones creaking and groaning as if it were breathing. My family moved there when...

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The Weight of Inheritance

Elias hadn’t wanted to come. The old farmhouse on Cinder Hill had always felt to him like a held breath, a place where the air itself was thick with unspoken...

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The Hollow Man of Cinder Ridge

I never put much stock in the supernatural. I was a practical man, a retired surveyor who trusted maps and measurements, not ghost stories. That was before the winter of...

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The Cartographer’s Hymn

The old Atlas building had a way of making you feel watched, but Alice chalked it up to nerves. She’d been hired as an archival assistant for the county’s historical...

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The Paper Birds

I had never lived anywhere but the city apartment my father and I shared, so moving to my grandmother’s farmhouse felt like being dropped onto another planet. The house itself...

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The Mold in the Machine

My uncle, Harold, was the kind of man who fixed things with his hands and spoke with them too, each gesture a hammer blow of certainty. He’d worked the night...

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The Dishwasher’s Name

Milo and I had been friends since we were kids, and we always told each other the truth, even when it was uncomfortable. Milo claimed he could see and feel...

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The Wardrobe in the Attic

My great-aunt Wilhelmina passed away in the summer of 1988, in the old farmhouse that had been in our family for generations. She had lived there alone for decades, and...

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The Leaning of the Glass

I moved into the old Carver place in the autumn of 2019, a rambling Victorian tucked into a hollow of the Appalachian foothills. The nearest neighbor was a good three...

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The Painted Jar

I moved to the outskirts of a sleepy New England town last autumn, into a house that had been vacant for years. My neighbor, an elderly woman named Mrs. Hargrove,...

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