Ghost stories from Pennsylvania

The Unwanted Playmate

As a young boy, I had a pretend companion named Leo. We built forts from pillows and sailed on sofa-cushion boats. My father said it was a normal phase, nothing...

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The Static Cascade

I was four when the world taught me to lie about what I saw. My mother called them dust motes, my father said it was just my imagination running wild....

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The Porcelain Choir

My grandmother kept a porcelain doll on the highest shelf in the sewing room. It had cracked, painted eyes that seemed to follow you, and its hair was real, braided...

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The Cobalt Morning

I kept a log of the silences. Every Tuesday, rain or shine, I drove out to the old Corliss house on the edge of the marsh, carrying my cleaning supplies...

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The Last Cart

As a child, I used to laugh at my grandmother’s stories about the old coal mine that ran beneath her property. She would sit on the porch of her crooked...

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The Ticking of the Third Floor

At sixteen, I was the designated keeper of quiet in our old brick house on Maple Street, a relic from the turn of the century that my parents had bought...

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The Brine-Marked Door

My name is Elena, and I run a small housekeeping service in the Saltmarsh District, just outside of Gloucester. We have eighteen clients and two part-timers, Delia and Marcus. I’m...

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The Gatekeeper’s Orchard

The sensation began as a faint prickle at the base of my skull, like a spider testing a web. I’d learned to ignore it by the time I was seven,...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Ledger

I came into this world on the last day of 1992, a fact my mother often cited as the reason for my peculiar sensitivity. When I was a few months...

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The Fire in the Snow

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had this ‘imaginary friend’ named Leo. He only appeared in my mind, usually when I was drifting off to sleep. Sometimes I’d catch...

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The Wail in the Walls

I was four when the walls of our farmhouse began to hum. Not the mechanical hum of the old refrigerator or the wind threading through the eaves, but a low,...

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The Last Grain Elevator

In the fall of 2004, I was twenty-seven, unemployed, and living in a cramped studio in Chicago. After two years of teaching high school English, I had quit with no...

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The Weight of Static

I was six when the air in my room turned to concrete. It was a summer night, the window cracked open to let in the sound of crickets, and I...

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The Linen Closet

My mother, Diane, has always been a light sleeper, but ever since my baby sister was born, she’s been running on fumes. She stays home with little Emma while I’m...

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The Ledger of the Deceased

In late autumn, my father, a collector of oddities, stumbled upon a derelict cemetery during one of his antiquing trips. Among the weathered stones, one caught his eye: a small,...

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The Hollow Ground of Millbrook

It was the autumn of 1967, and I was twelve, in the eighth grade at Millbrook Junior High in upstate New York. Our history teacher, Miss Aldridge, had organized a...

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The Cone Hollow Road

In the summer of 1982, my family and I were staying at my grandmother’s old farmhouse in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania. The nearest neighbor was a good half-mile...

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The Salt Line

In the autumn of 2017, I was a civilian contractor, fresh out of the Navy, working on a remote weather station in the Cascade Range. Between assignments, I took a...

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The Saltwood Clock

The summer I turned nine, my parents parked my sister Cora and me at our grandparents’ farm in the rolling hills of southern Ohio. The farmhouse, a sagging Victorian with...

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The Sunken Bell

The air in Vicksburg, Mississippi, always felt heavier than it should, as if the humidity itself was saturated with the past. My grandmother, Eleanor, had been a collector of strange...

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The Bone-Dry Silence

The summer had been brutal, a relentless assault of heat and humidity that clung to you like a second skin. I was miles from the nearest road, deep in the...

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The Lantern’s Debt

The third evening at the Cattail Marsh Boardwalk, my cousin Elena and I decided to walk the wooden path that snaked through the reeds and stagnant water. We were killing...

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The Lace Curtain’s Cough

In October of 2019, I traveled with my wife, her brother, and his fiancée to the historic town of Vicksburg, Mississippi, drawn by its Civil War legacy and the persistent...

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The Hollow Field

The move from Al Khor to the quiet suburbs of Ohio was supposed to be our clean break. My wife, Leila, and I had convinced ourselves that the oppressive heat...

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