Ghost stories from Pennsylvania

The Painted Loft

My name is Alice Merton, and this is the strangest thing that ever happened to me. I had been living in the bustling heart of Baltimore, but my new job...

Read Story →

The Last Tenant

In the autumn of 2014, I rented a room in an old Victorian house in the sleepy town of New Carthage, Ohio. The owners, Martha and Elias, were a kind...

Read Story →

The Uninvited Guest

On the night of November 2, 2019, at 11:47 PM, I was alone in my new apartment, a cramped studio in the industrial district of a city that never truly...

Read Story →

The Last Patient

Dr. Elias Vance had spent thirty years within the sterile walls of St. Jude’s Memorial, a hospital that had become more of a home than his own apartment. He knew...

Read Story →

The Lantern’s Vigil

I was twenty-three when I finally told anyone the whole story. My sister, Lena, and I had just finished moving our mother into the nursing home, and we were sitting...

Read Story →

The Painted Shawl

I’ll never forget the summer we drove to Vicksburg, Mississippi, to visit my great-aunt Clara. The town was steeped in antebellum history, but the real reason we went was to...

Read Story →

The Lantern of Gray Hollow

I was twelve the summer we moved to Gray Hollow, a town that seemed to exist only in the margins of old maps. Our house sat at the edge of...

Read Story →

The Last Canoe on Lark’s Pond

My grandmother’s brother, Uncle Theo, had a fishing shack on a narrow, weedy lake in northern Wisconsin, built in the late ’40s when the pines were still thick enough to...

Read Story →

The Clockmaker’s Debt

The old farmhouse on Kestrel Lane had always hummed with a low, constant vibration, like the tuning fork of some unseen instrument. My grandmother, Elspeth, called it the ‘house’s heartbeat,’...

Read Story →

The Wandering Star

In the autumn of 1979, I was eleven, and my best friend was a girl named Calla. She lived with her family in a sprawling, gingerbread-laden house on the edge...

Read Story →

The Marble Recess

The town of Millbrook, Oregon, had a park that everyone called ‘The Grove.’ It was a lush, overgrown pocket of land donated to the city by the eccentric widow, Elara...

Read Story →

The Whisker Touch

I’ve always had a way with animals. Not like a whisperer or a charmer, just… a calm. When I was a kid, I could walk into the middle of a...

Read Story →

The Chime at Dusk

Margaret had lived in the old farmhouse at the edge of town for nearly a decade. It was a quiet place, surrounded by fields that turned golden in the autumn,...

Read Story →

The Clockwork Santa

My grandmother’s house always smelled of mothballs and cinnamon, a combination that should have been comforting but instead felt like a warning. It was my grandfather’s childhood home, a creaking...

Read Story →

The Silent Auction

At nine, I was a connoisseur of shadows. My bedroom in the old Gable House, inherited from a great-uncle I never met, was a Victorian relic with a closet that...

Read Story →

The Hollow Man in the Red Room

The summer fieldwork trip to the Ashworth Complex was supposed to be a routine study of urban decay and local folklore. I was there with my research partner, Lena, and...

Read Story →

The Man in the Hallway

It was just after six in the evening when I started cleaning the living room. I had an hour before I needed to pick up my partner, Mark, from his...

Read Story →

The Glass Corridor

The house in Ridgely, Pennsylvania, was a gaunt, three-story Victorian that leaned slightly to one side, as if it had been caught mid-sigh. My uncle had bought it for a...

Read Story →

The Cellblock That Remembers

My name is Daniel Reyes, and I’ve been a corrections officer at Meridian State Penitentiary for just over ten months. The place is a relic, built in the 1840s, with...

Read Story →

The Phantom Ledger

The clock on the wall of the study hall had a nervous tick, a stutter that made the seconds feel like they were being dragged out. I was hunched over...

Read Story →

The Box of Flags

The call from my mother came on a Tuesday, her voice thin and frayed. My Aunt Elsie had finally passed after a long, stubborn battle with something the doctors couldn’t...

Read Story →

The Custodian’s Regret

It was the autumn of my sixth grade year when we moved to the town of Millbrook, a place so small that the only notable landmark was the old textile...

Read Story →

The Salt Line

The return from Redemption Hollow was supposed to end the nightmare. Three days of scraping lichen off Civil War grave markers in the rain had left me brittle, my nerves...

Read Story →

The Ceramic Lamb’s Vigil

My grandmother’s house always smelled of camphor and old paper, but that December it carried an extra layer of frost. I was eleven, sent to stay with her while my...

Read Story →