Ghost stories from South Carolina

The Late Delivery

I was sixteen, home alone for the first time in what felt like forever. My parents had taken my little sister to visit our grandparents upstate, and they wouldn’t be...

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The Frequency of Static

I was eighteen, sprawled out on the cracked leather sofa in my uncle’s dusty farmhouse, the only light coming from the flickering TV and the pale moon through the grimy...

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The Hollow Gable

Our land, the Briar Hollow, stretches for a hundred and sixty acres, a patchwork of woods and old fields that my family has worked for generations. My grandparents’ farmhouse sat...

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The Ledger of Unfinished Business

It’s hard to know what to believe when you hear a story secondhand. You filter it through someone else’s memory, their fear, their hesitation. But when my cousin Eva told...

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The Empty Floor

The smell of burnt sugar and canned peaches clung to the air, a ghost of countless failed attempts at pie crust and apple crisp. I was a junior at Millbrook...

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The Last Bell

It was 3:47 AM on a Tuesday when I stumbled upon the post. I wasn’t supposed to be awake—my shift at the diner had ended at midnight, and my roommate’s...

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The Half-Lit Morning

Milo had worked the night shift at the grain mill for three years, and the rhythm of returning home at dawn had become second nature. He’d pull into the gravel...

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The Basement Static

I’m not entirely sure if what I heard was real, but I’ll let you decide. This happened last Saturday, the 28th of March, during a long weekend I had taken...

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The Painted Prayer

In the foothills of the Appalachians, where the kudzu swallowed old barns and the air hung thick with the smell of damp earth, stood the Millbrook house. It had a...

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The Clock on the Mantel

My parents and I share a house that has stood for over a century, its bones groaning with age. I returned two years ago, after a series of failed apartments,...

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The Harvest of Static

I remember the summer I turned seven, when the air in our new house tasted like old pennies and burnt toast. My twin brother Leo and I were unpacking boxes...

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The Hollow Bell of Flintwood

My first conscious memory is of the brass bell in the tower of the Flintwood Meeting House. It was a cold, gray October afternoon when my mother lifted me onto...

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The Hollow Turn

Ever since I can remember, my best friend Marcus and I had a strange gift. Whenever we ventured out together for any real length of time, something bizarre always found...

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The Night Shift at Cinder Falls

I worked the overnight shift at Cinder Falls Transitional Care, a place that was supposed to be a stepping stone between hospital and home. But most of our residents were...

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The Cartography of Dust

In the autumn of 2014, I was a freshman at Blackwood High, a sprawling brick institution that had swallowed the old junior high. The building was a maze of identical...

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The Rind and the Root

The Rind and the Root My name is Daniel Marsh, and I’ve spent most of my life chasing phantoms. Since I was a kid, I’ve devoured ghost stories, haunted house...

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The Glass Chapel

The town of Ashford had a secret, a place the locals whispered about but never named aloud: the Glass Chapel. It wasn’t a church, though it had once been a...

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The Cold Pocket

My first semester at Meridian College, I landed in an interior dorm room, a converted storage closet with no windows. My roommate, Dana, and I called it ‘The Cave.’ We...

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The Iron Gate

I had never set foot in that cemetery without my grandmother. Even after she passed, I felt her presence there, a gentle tug at the edge of my thoughts, as...

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The Vanishing Aisle

I’m dictating this on my phone because my trusty old desktop finally gave up the ghost — the power supply died with a sad fizzle, leaving me with just this...

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The Keepsake of June Hollow

My first of three children was born in the biting cold of January 2012, in a house that backed onto the overgrown expanse of June Hollow. I named her Petra,...

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The Echo of Grimthorpe Hall

My grandmother always said the women in our family were born with one foot in the veil, and I’d grown up with that weight, seeing shapes in the periphery and...

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The Bulb That Burned Back

At nineteen, I was a self-proclaimed skeptic with a penchant for provocation. I had just transferred to a small university in the middle of nowhere, a place where the nights...

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The Room Beneath the Root Cellar

In the autumn of 1994, I moved into a sprawling Victorian that had been subdivided into apartments. My roommate, Marcus, and I took the top two floors, while two art...

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