Ghost stories from Pennsylvania

The Silent Cradle

In the autumn of 2015, my grandmother, Elsie, was watching my infant cousin, Theo, in her small cottage nestled in the pine woods of northern Minnesota. The cottage had been...

Read Story →

The Cold Spot at Bedtime

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been obsessed with the supernatural. I devoured every book on ghosts and demons, and I’d pester my grandmother for her stories about the...

Read Story →

The Static Visitor

The first time it happened, I blamed the new sleep aid my doctor had prescribed after my chronic insomnia took a turn for the worse. The little blue pill was...

Read Story →

The Curator of Static

The old Renwick house had been a fixture of our town for over a century, its peeling white paint and crooked shutters a silent testament to the whispers that clung...

Read Story →

The Hollow Below the Stairwell

The old farmhouse sat on a ridge above the floodplain, its bones creaking with every gust of wind that swept down from the hills. I had moved in after my...

Read Story →

The Cradle of Static

The house on Mallow Street had always breathed. Not in the way old houses settle, but with a deliberate, rhythmic sigh that matched the rise and fall of my own...

Read Story →

The Cinder Girl of Copper Row

That summer, the heat in our apartment on Copper Row was unbearable. The old building’s radiators clanked even in July, and the window unit in the living room could barely...

Read Story →

The House With A Million Eyes 2

To be honest, I get the heebie jeebies all over thinking back on this. But anyway, here we go, back where I left off on the first part. After my...

Read Story →

The Salt Line

We moved to the Maine coast in the late autumn, when the tourist towns were buttoned up tight as clams. My mother, a city woman all her life, had fallen...

Read Story →

The Weight of Wings

My name is Elara Voss, and I’ve been seeing moths. Not the pretty, dusty kind that flutter around porch lights in summer. These are different—small, black, with wings that seem...

Read Story →

The Uninvited Sweeper

I moved into the Meridian, a crumbling 1920s relic on the edge of Omaha, last March. The walls sweat with old plaster dust, and the radiators clank like bones in...

Read Story →

The Static Cradle

The night our world collapsed, the rain came down in sheets, pounding against the windows of our rented bungalow in the coastal town of Duncairn. My wife, Elena, and I...

Read Story →

The Grease Stain on the Ceiling

I never believed in the word ‘haunted’ until I met my mother’s cousin Lenny. He was a big, greasy man who owned a diner outside of Pinedale, a dying town...

Read Story →

The Bell Tower’s Tenant

I never told anyone about the night I saw the man in the bell tower. It was the summer I turned sixteen, and my family had just moved into the...

Read Story →

The Tail in the Corridor

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. I was the type who would explain away every creak and flicker as the house settling or a draft. But then we lost...

Read Story →

The Ledger of Misfortune

The winter of my twenty-first year was a season of losses, each one piling onto the next like snowdrifts against a failing door. I’d left university with a suspended scholarship,...

Read Story →

The Mirror-Well Pact

I was nine when I first learned that God doesn’t answer prayers—at least, not the way we expect. My name is Elias, and this is the story of the thing...

Read Story →

The Day the Pinwheel Stopped

I am a veterinarian, not a psychologist, but I know that our minds are like deep lakes, and sometimes, when the water is still, something old and forgotten floats to...

Read Story →

The Static Between Stations

The alarm clock read 6:47 AM. Outside, the November dark clung to the frost-rimmed windows of my third-floor apartment in Duluth, a city of iron and lake-haze. My father’s voice...

Read Story →

Psychics, Witches, And Ghosts. Oh My!

This was when I was like 7 or 8, it was about 9:30 at night and my mom and I were downstairs watching TV. My mom went to wake my...

Read Story →

The Unpainted Circle

My grandfather built our house in 2015, a modest two-story in the foothills of the Appalachians. The land had been in our family for generations, but the house itself was...

Read Story →