Ghost stories from South Dakota

The Last Nightshift at Rook’s End

Rook’s End Cemetery had always felt like a place that existed outside of time. It was a sprawling, neglected field of tombstones that leaned at odd angles, guarded by a...

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The Hollow Feast

My name is Elara, and this is what happened after I started seeing the hunger in everyone’s eyes. It began with a dream that felt more like a memory of...

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The Lunar Mark

Ever since I can remember, nights were a battleground. It wasn’t a fear of the dark or monsters under the bed; it was something else, something that pressed upon me...

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The Cipher in the Attic

My name is Evelyn, and I’ve spent the better part of a decade chasing whispers through the static of the paranormal. I lead a small team out of the pine-dark...

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The Hollow Face

As a child, I never feared the dark like other kids. I feared the window. Our house in the dusty outskirts of Quartz Creek, Nevada, had a window that faced...

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The Room Below the Stairs

We moved into the old farmhouse when I was seven, and the place felt wrong from the first night. The floorboards creaked in patterns that didn’t match our footsteps, and...

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At Wind Cave

It was shortly after the 4th of July holiday that I had begun a summer road trip. My aim was to see as many of our western National Parks as...

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The Perimeter Walker

I moved into my older brother’s room in the fall of 2007, after he’d shipped off to the navy. The room was a good six feet longer than my old...

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The Porcelain Visitor

It was the summer of 2021, and my family had decided to make the long drive from Ohio to the sunbaked plains of western Kansas. My grandfather, a retired farmer...

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The Ninth Night of the Winter Moon

Mara had always been a solitary soul, and her only constant companion for eighteen years was her calico cat, Juniper. Juniper wore a worn leather collar with a small silver...

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The Weight of the Stone

The wind over the Painted Desert had a way of erasing time. We’d driven for hours through that maze of striped rock and dry scrub, the Jeep’s heater barely keeping...

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The Third Shift at the Drayton Mill

I never gave much thought to the old Drayton Mill, even when I was a kid growing up in the rust belt town of Meridian. It had been abandoned for...

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The Mercury Hour

The little house squatted at the end of a gravel lane, its flaking pink paint like a wound in the tall grass. My friend Mira lived there with her mother,...

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The Glass Face on the Wall

The summer after we moved to the dusty outskirts of Amarillo, Texas, I slept in a room that smelled of old plaster and sun-baked wood. I was six, maybe seven,...

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The Basement of Rotting Roots

In the summer of 2003, I was nineteen and working at a hardware store in the dusty town of Pritchard, Oklahoma. My girlfriend, Lena, lived with her family on a...

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The Watcher at the Dresser

My daughter Lily had just turned five, and we’d moved into a creaky old farmhouse on the edge of a town called Hollow Creek. It was the kind of place...

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The Wet Footsteps

I never thought much about the old farmhouse on Sagebrush Lane, not until that summer when I was thirteen. My parents had bought it cheap, hoping to fix it up,...

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The Ragged Hem

The house on Birchwood Lane had a peculiar silence that settled after midnight, a silence so thick it felt like the walls themselves were holding their breath. I was seventeen,...

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The Ball Below

The morning light filtered through the dusty blinds, casting long stripes across the cluttered living room. I was twelve, and the smell of stale coffee and baby powder hung in...

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The Watcher at 4:30

Maya had been at Cedar Ridge Job Corps for three months, and she still wasn’t used to the silence of the dormitory at night. It was a converted logging camp,...

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The Tub Reader

I was fifteen that summer, the year Dad took the night shift at the cannery and Mom started working doubles at the diner. The house on Birch Lane was ours,...

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The Bell Chime in the Chalk Hills

My name is Elijah Whitehorse, and I’ve lived in the shadow of the Chalk Hills all my life. We’re not on a reservation, but my family has a plot of...

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The Fingerprint in the Dust

My father was the superintendent of the Goodwill Dam project, so we lived in a cluster of government-built cottages on the lake’s edge, where the water gnawed at the foundations...

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