Ghost stories from Rhode Island

The Painted Vigil

The chain-link fence stood like a row of rusted teeth, biting into the overgrown lot where the old Meridian Textile Mill had collapsed into itself. My friend, Maya, pointed at...

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The Mulberry Mark

My name is Elara, and I’ve always been a bit strange. My older sister, Mira, was the one who opened my eyes to the paranormal. At first, I was terrified...

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The Mannequin in the Parlor

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. I was a skeptic, a pragmatist, someone who needed to see something to believe it. But that was before the night at the...

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The Painted Door

I was never a believer in the wandering dead. My faith was a fortress of absolutes—God above, the Devil below, and the living between. Spirits, ghosts, the restless echoes of...

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The Hollow Bed

I’m Mira, sixteen years old, from a small town in Oregon. Last autumn, my family and I went to stay at my great-aunt’s cabin in the high desert, a place...

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The Phantom Purr

In the quiet town of Ashwick, my aunt Mildred was known for her two aging cats, Jasper and Mabel. Jasper, a burly ginger tom, had passed away last autumn, and...

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The Salt Room

When I was a kid, every few months my mother would pack our lives into cardboard boxes and we’d move to a new town, a new school, a new set...

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The Bell at Six-Thirty

When I first moved into the old Beacon Hill boarding house, I thought the creaks and groans were just the building settling. The previous tenant, a reclusive clockmaker, had left...

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The Persistent Pattern

Our home was a vast, old Victorian near the granite quarries, built in 1902 for the quarry master. My great-uncle, Elias, had worked the quarries and later bought the house...

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The Weeping Fiddle

In the autumn of my twelfth year, I discovered that the old farmhouse we’d rented on the edge of the Blackwood Forest had a peculiar resident. The house itself was...

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The Moth in the Window

The house on Hemlock Lane had always been a place of soft sounds: the creak of the porch swing, the rustle of oak leaves, the distant hum of the highway....

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The Hollow Below the Hearth

I have lived in the ground floor of the old Meridian Flats for eight years now, ever since the building was converted from a small department store and a bakery...

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The Concrete Lungs

The first time I noticed the house on Maple Street breathing was when I was seven, pressing my ear against the cool basement wall just to see what Mom always...

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The Rain on the Aluminum Roof

Sergeant First Class Harold Vance was a lifer, a man who spoke in acronyms and orders, and we, his family, were his platoon. In 1971, the Army parked us at...

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Hypnagogic Hallucinations?

I have had many different types of “visitations” from my point of view. From dark figures in my bedroom doorway that I couldn’t really see no matter how hard I...

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The Cradle of Lent

After months of apartment hunting, Maya finally found a place she could afford: the top floor of a creaky Victorian in the mill town of Fall River, Massachusetts. The rent...

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The Arrangement on Millstone Lane

The year I turned eleven, we moved into the old carriage house on Millstone Lane, a narrow, crumbling estate that had once served as the gatekeeper’s lodge for the sprawling...

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The Ninth Key

It had been nine years since the last time I set foot in Raven’s Hollow, a decaying coastal town that clung to the cliffs like a barnacle. My twin brother,...

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The Chimney at Kettle House

We bought our home, a crooked Victorian named Kettle House for its rusty cupola, last June. The realtor said it was a fixer-upper with charm, and we were young and...

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The Lantern in the Fog

I never believed in ghosts, not really. But after what happened to me, I started to think there was something out there, something that watched over me or maybe tormented...

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The Pale Visitor

My sister-in-law, Lena, and her friend, Marta, had always been drawn to the old, moss-covered cemetery that sat at the edge of our town. It wasn’t the kind of place...

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The Gully Boys

When I was four, I had two invisible playmates. I called them Pip and Squeak, though Squeak was never a fitting name for something so menacing. They only appeared at...

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The Seamstress’s Loom

The house in Hollow Bay sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, its peeling white paint and sagging porch a stark contrast to the cheerful bungalows that lined the street....

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The Bent Banister

I was eleven when we moved into the house on Cinder Lane, a two-story box that had once belonged to a widower named Elias. The realtor didn’t hide it: Elias...

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