Ghost stories from South Carolina

The Loom of Still Hours

At fourteen, I considered myself the stable one in my family. My parents were artists, which meant our house was a beautiful chaos of half-finished canvases, clay dust, and arguments...

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The Quiet Tenant

My life was unremarkable until my twelfth year, when my parents’ marriage dissolved like sugar in rain. My mother, Elara, and I moved to a weathered Victorian on the edge...

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The Lighthouse Keeper’s Ledger

In the damp, moss-draped town of Stillwater, Maine, during the late 1980s, we lived in a sprawling Victorian house that overlooked a rocky cove. The house had been our home...

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The Keeper of Lost Things

The old farmhouse had been in the family for generations, but I only came to it after my aunt passed. The place was full of her peculiar collections: jars of...

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The Last Watch

I never thought much about the old farmhouse until after the funeral. It had been in the family for generations, and now it stood empty, a skeleton of timber and...

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The Frost on the Ridge

I was perched on the edge of the old farmhouse roof, the tin cold under my thighs, when Mia started her usual litany of complaints. Below us, the valley glowed...

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The Lantern Keeper

Mara had just finished clearing the last of the cake crumbs from the kitchen counter when she heard the soft cooing from the nursery. It was a sound she had...

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The Scent of Rain on Concrete

I’ve learned to accept that my life runs on a different frequency than most people’s. Growing up, I had an imaginary friend, a tall figure with a kind face who...

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The Hollow Between the Pines

The rattle began as a soft, rhythmic percussion against the windowpane, like a chorus of tiny, wooden mallets. I remember pausing, comic book frozen mid-air, convinced it was just the...

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The Lantern Boy

I’ve always been one to notice things others might dismiss—a chill in a warm room, a flicker of movement in my peripheral vision, a feeling of being watched when I’m...

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The Uninvited Round

Three nights ago, my cousin Piper and I unearthed a battered wooden board from the crawlspace beneath Aunt Meg’s old farmhouse. Aunt Meg had always refused to discuss the house’s...

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The Hollow Broadcast

Evelyn had recently moved into a narrow, pre-war walk-up in the industrial district of a city that never quite slept. The apartment, number 4B, was affordable for a reason: the...

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The Lantern of Four Flames

In the autumn of 1919, in the quiet town of Millbrook, nestled in the fog-laden valleys of the Pacific Northwest, lived a woman named Agnes. She was a seamstress by...

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The Tallow Man

In the autumn of my tenth year, my mother and I left the familiar red-clay roads of north Georgia for a narrow, two-story house wedged between a dying magnolia and...

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The Pale Visitor of Lot 12

I was nine when we moved into the Pines, a trailer park that hugged the edge of a forgotten forest in northern Wisconsin. The place smelled of pine needles and...

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The Pinewood Rocking Chair

In the autumn of that year, my aunt was hospitalized in rural Vermont, so my father drove his brother, my two siblings, and me to the small town of Millbrook...

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The Winter of the Hollow Man

The ice on the windows of the old Bassett farmhouse had a way of making the world outside look like the inside of a frozen seashell—pale, rippled, and impossibly distant....

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The Last Ember

The call came at 6:03 AM, a time I knew meant nothing good. It was my wife, Mara, her voice thin and cracked like old leather. She had spent the...

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The Static at 3:00

My name is Daniel, and I’ve always believed that the universe is full of things we can’t see or understand. I’m a spiritual man, a firm believer in the unseen,...

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The Hollow Bedroom Window

My name is Elias, and I’ve spent a good chunk of my life chasing the unexplained. But nothing prepared me for Rowan Falls, a decaying mill town where the fog...

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The Paper Procession

At five, I believed the world was soft and small, bounded by the gravel road and the pine woods that swallowed the horizon. We lived in a rented farmhouse on...

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The Static Between Breaths

In the autumn of 2011, I moved into a narrow, three-story walk-up in the industrial edge of Verona, New Jersey, where the old brick buildings leaned like tired shoulders against...

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The Hollow Birth

The summer Maud turned seventeen, the heat lay over the Carter farm like a wool blanket pulled too tight. Cicadas sawed their jagged chorus from the dry grass, and the...

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The Unseen Tenant

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been obsessed with the other side. I collected books on séances, recorded static hoping for EVPs, and slept with a digital recorder on...

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