Ghost stories from Tennessee

The Lattice of Unfinished Things

The first thing I noticed about the house on Maple Hollow Road was the ivy. It had overtaken the entire western wall, crawling over the windows in thick, gnarled ropes,...

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The Bedroom Door

I’m Marek, and last night, the night before my fifteenth birthday, I was alone in the living room of our old farmhouse on the edge of the Blackwood Forest. My...

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The Late Show at Hollow Creek

I’d been in Oregon for barely a month, renting a ramshackle farmhouse outside the town of Hollow Creek. The place was a relic from the 1800s, with creaking floorboards and...

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The Pale Crawler

My name is Elara, and I have always seen things that others cannot. It is a gift, or a curse, that has shadowed me my entire life. Spirits, ghosts, the...

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The Bog House Incident

In the autumn of 1984, the Voss family moved into a decaying Victorian house on the edge of a cranberry bog. The place had been vacant for decades, and the...

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The Man in the Pale Cloth

My whole life, I’ve been haunted by glimpses of something just out of sight, always in the corner of my eye. It started when I was a kid, playing in...

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A Thousand Tiny Lights

The last time I saw my grandmother alive, she was sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, sorting through a pile of dried beans she had spilled. She looked up at...

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The Loop of Unspoken Names

At seventeen, I lost my grandfather, Everett, to a sudden cardiac arrest. He was my hero, the man who taught me to whittle, to spot constellations, and to value silence....

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The Periwinkle Man

The summer I turned eight, my father and I were staying at Uncle Theo’s farmhouse, a place that smelled of mothballs and old wood. It was a sweltering afternoon, and...

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The Cellar of Unfinished Things

I turned thirty last Tuesday, and the milestone felt less like a celebration and more like a verdict. For eighteen years, I’ve carried a question that has no answer, a...

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The Static Between

I’ve always been a bit sensitive to the other side, but it never felt like a curse until now. When I was sixteen, my mother passed after a long illness....

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The Poodle in the Static

I never believed in ghosts until I met my husband’s grandmother, Ruth. She was a tiny, sharp-tongued woman with a shock of white hair and a penchant for chain-smoking menthols...

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The Neighborhood Stray

This one is a little weird. When I was still in high school I always rode the bus. I was the first one to get picked up so it was...

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Getting Her Last Laugh

My grandmother died February 2008 but the unexplained happenings didn’t start until a few months later when my aunt (and her daughter) was diagnosed with the same cancerous tumor (luckily...

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The Night the Hallway Breathed

I moved into my stepfather’s farmhouse in the Missouri Ozarks last autumn, hoping for a fresh start after my mother’s remarriage. The house was a sprawling Victorian relic, all creaking...

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The Wardrobe’s Witness

I’m a sixty-three-year-old retired schoolteacher, a widow, and a woman whose word has never been doubted in this dusty town of Kettle Springs, Oklahoma. We’re plain folk here, and we...

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The Jukebox at 14 Ash Lane

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. The stories my grandmother told me about restless spirits and haunted houses were just that—stories. But that was before I moved into 14...

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The Unexpected Guest

When I was young, my mother’s sister, Clara, moved in with us after a difficult separation. She needed a place to stay while she got back on her feet, so...

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The Tenant of the Crawlspace

My earliest clear memory is of the crawlspace door. It was a small, painted-shut rectangle in the hallway floor of our rented farmhouse in eastern Oregon, a place where the...

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The Man in the Blue Overalls

When I moved from the damp, grey suburbs of Seattle to the sun-scorched flatlands of central Oklahoma, I expected a change of pace, not a change of reality. My new...

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The Nailed Windows

I was twenty-one when I played bass for a small bluegrass gospel band called the Hollow Creek Singers. We weren’t famous, not even close, but we had a following in...

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The Red Door at the End of the Hall

I never told anyone about the itch. It started on my wedding day, a faint tickle on the back of my neck, like a fly that wouldn’t land. By the...

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The Weight of the Attic Beam

The scent of new paint and old dust mingled in the air, a strange perfume for a house breathing with a decade of memories. Amelia stood on the rickety stepladder,...

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The Man Who Stays in My Room

It has been almost eleven years since my grandfather died. He fought a long and difficult illness in the final months, and it pained him to know he would likely...

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