Ghost stories from South Carolina

The Still Room

I moved into the top half of a converted Victorian-era hospital, the old Mercy Annex, which had been sliced into two flats. My unit occupied the upper two floors, connected...

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The Cipher in the Static

The first time I noticed the pattern, I was kneeling on the cold linoleum of the kitchen floor, my cheek pressed to the tile because the vibration felt like a...

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The Salt and the Silence

In the sweltering August of 2019, fresh out of university, my partner Elias and I decided to start our life together in the quiet coastal town of Dunmore, a place...

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The Cast-Iron Sentinel

The summer of 1982 found me on the southern coast of Virginia, in a stretch of marshland that the locals called the Tangle. It was a thousand acres of dense...

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The Lantern of Marrow Fen

The town of Marrow Fen squats on the edge of a vast, black mire that has swallowed more than its share of secrets. Some say the fen itself is a...

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The Pull of the Root

I never believed in the old tales the villagers whispered about the forest, not until the night the birch root pulled me from my sleep. My name is Elias, and...

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The Flicker on the Landing

In the autumn of 1993, my brother Dane, my sister Meredith, and I lived with our parents in an old house on the edge of a town that had more...

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The White Noise at 4:03

It was the summer of 2014, and I was housesitting for my aunt in her isolated farmhouse, forty miles from the nearest town. The house was old, with creaking floorboards...

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The Static Between Stations

In the autumn of 1998, the old Grundig radio in the attic of the Hartley house began tuning itself to frequencies that didn’t exist. The house itself was a Victorian...

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The Pressure Against the Glass

Autumn 2002. I was living in a rented cabin in the woods of northern Maine, far from any town. The cabin had a single bedroom, a wood stove, and a...

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The Hollow Corner

Elara had always been sensitive to the unseen, but it wasn’t until she moved into the old house on Maple Street that she realized her gift had a focal point....

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The Gentlemen’s Grace

I remember the day clearly—the way the afternoon sun painted the old schoolhouse’s brick walls in shades of honey, or how the air inside tasted of cornbread and slow-cooked collards....

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The Painted Window

It was the last week of August, and the heat had settled over the town like a damp blanket. I was lying on the top bunk of the bed I...

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The Hollow Harvest

The house on Mistletoe Lane had a way of holding onto things. Not just dust and the smell of old wood, but moments, sounds, and sometimes, if you listened closely,...

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The Stillness Between Heartbeats

The event happened when I was only a few weeks old, a fact I know only through the fractured recollections of my mother and grandmother. They both remember it vividly,...

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The Knitter’s Guest

My sister Delia and I had just moved into the old Barlow house, a Victorian relic that had sat empty for years. Mom had inherited it from a distant aunt,...

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The Lantern Man of Cinder Hollow

Cinder Hollow wasn’t on any map that mattered. It was a dead-end road that looped through a forgotten patch of pine and kudzu, where the cell service died and the...

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The Cradle of Static

In the fall of 2004, I was eleven, and my family had just moved into a decrepit farmhouse on the outskirts of a town that time forgot. The house smelled...

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The Hollow Step

I’ve lived in the harbor town of Port Blossom all my life, in a two-story saltbox house that’s stood since the whaling days. The front door opens into a narrow...

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The Cabinet Latch

My grandmother called it the ‘sight.’ Every woman in our line had it, but I got it at birth. It was the day I was born that the radiators in...

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The Hat in the Cedar Chest

I’m Maya, and I’ve always felt a strange absence in my life. My father, a man I never knew, died when I was just a baby. He was swimming in...

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The Cartographer’s Debt

My name is Elias Thorne, and for forty-two years I have lived in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, in a town called Pemberton that most maps have forgotten. I...

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The Groaning Pipes

I never believed in ghosts, not really. Not until the winter I spent at my grandmother’s old farmhouse in the high desert of New Mexico, a place where the wind...

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The Persistent Warmth

Our house in the Piedmont had a way of holding heat, even in the winter. I remember the radiators ticking and sighing like old men, but the warmth that mattered...

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