Ghost stories from Tennessee

The Iron Ring

The first time I heard my name spoken in that house, I was eight years old, sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal. The sound came from...

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The Persistent Draft

I moved into the old farmhouse at the edge of the hollow, a place where the trees leaned close as if listening. The previous tenant had left in a hurry,...

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The Stain Above

I woke up just like any other morning, the familiar hum of the ceiling fan and the soft weight of my dog, Gunter, curled at my feet. Mila, my wife,...

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The Weight of the Upper Room

The old farmhouse had always been a place of quiet persistence, its bones creaking with the memory of seasons. We never spoke of the upstairs, not directly. It was just...

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The Low-Flying Leviathan

The summer I turned eleven, my cousin Marco came tearing down the gravel path to our farmhouse, his face a mask of terror. He was shouting about a colossal white...

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Tales From The Homeplace

The old homeplace started out as a simple four room farmhouse with an attic type upstairs. It had porches in both front and back, with part of the back porch...

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The Unsettled Cart

The scar on my palm had faded to a pale line, a reminder of the incident that had made me swear I’d never stay late alone again. But life has...

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The Frequency of the Flesh

In the fall of 2011, I took a night-shift job at a twenty-four-hour convenience store tucked between a defunct laundromat and a pawnshop on the edge of Millbrook, a town...

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The Chalk Drawing on Durmast Lane

The chalk outline of a small hand had been on the pavement outside our house for weeks. Every time it rained, I thought it would wash away, but it reappeared,...

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The Glass Wardrobe

I never believed in ghosts until I moved into my stepfather’s house, an old Victorian relic that creaked with every settling timber. My room was at the end of a...

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The Rust-Colored Stain

The first time I noticed something was wrong with the house on Maple Hollow Road, I was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at a plate of scrambled eggs that...

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The Lantern in the Corn

It wasn’t the kind of night you’d expect for strange happenings—just a crisp autumn evening in the quiet farmlands of eastern Iowa, where the only sounds were the rustle of...

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At The Hermitage

AT THE HERMITAGE Being country music fans, my parents and I had decided to take a spring road trip from Wisconsin to Nashville, Tennessee. It was a nice break from...

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The Doomsday Broadcast

I’ve always found comfort in the static-filled crackle of old radio shows. My grandfather left me his vintage Philco, a relic from the 1940s, and I’ve spent countless nights tuning...

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The Weeping Conveyor

The old mill complex sprawled across the valley like a sleeping beast, its rusted ribs of steel and concrete half-swallowed by the encroaching pines. I’d stumbled upon it during one...

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The Weeping Ash

When my husband Tomas and I bought the old farmhouse outside of Millbrook, Alabama, we thought we’d found a hidden gem. The realtor had warned us it had been abandoned...

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The Last Candle at Willet’s Wake

My name is Elias, and this happened when I was seven, back in the autumn of 1998, in the small town of Hollow Creek. My great-aunt Hester had passed after...

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The Luminous Visitor

Three years after my mother passed, my wife and I moved from our cramped city apartment to the old lighthouse keeper’s cottage on the coast. The cottage had been in...

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The Triangle of Ash and Root

My name is Maya, and I’ve lived in this house for a year now, but it still doesn’t feel like home. The house itself is fine, but the backyard has...

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The Ledger of Dirt and Bone

The day I moved into the Cattail House, the sky was the color of a fresh bruise. The house itself sat at the end of a gravel drive that petered...

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The Swing Under the Snow Moon

In the winter of 1994, I was a senior at Millbrook High, a small town nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians. My part-time job was custodial work at St....

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The Porcelain Room

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. Not even after the war, when I saw things that could have been ghosts, or might have been trauma, or might have been...

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The Iron Cradle’s Fall

In the autumn of 1997, my wife Elena and I took a trip to the historic manor of Governor Aldric Thorne, nestled in the rolling hills of Virginia. Thorne had...

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The Aster Garden

The Aster Garden had always been a place of stillness, a half-acre of overgrown flowers and gnarled trees behind my grandmother’s house. After she passed, I inherited it, and I...

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