Ghost stories from Tennessee

The Lurching Figure on Route 9

In the autumn of 2004, I was driving back from a late shift at the paper mill with my coworker, Dale. We were on Route 9, a lonely stretch that...

Read Story →

The Keys Under the Sink

I never believed in the old house. It was just a house, a drafty Victorian with peeling paint and a porch that sagged like a tired jaw. My mom, her...

Read Story →

The Watcher at the Threshold

I never believed in the supernatural. Not as a child, not as an adult, and certainly not now, even after what happened that winter in our house on Maple Hollow...

Read Story →

The Lull of the Far North

Maya had grown up with the hum of the old house, a creaking Victorian relic her grandmother had insisted on keeping. It was in the wallpaper’s faded roses, the scent...

Read Story →

The Fourth Pane

The summer before Eliot turned four, a peculiar thing happened. I had bought a small plastic pool for the backyard, thinking he would enjoy splashing in the water on those...

Read Story →

The Calendar of Last Days

In the spring of 2012, I lost two people within a single week, and the grief that followed was like a fog that wouldn’t lift. The first was my friend...

Read Story →

The Carousel at Dusk

My name is Evelyn, and I’m seventeen. My peculiar affliction started when I was six: I began to see figures that didn’t quite belong, lingering in the periphery of my...

Read Story →

The Courtyard of the Hollow Men

The apartment complex was a neat little horseshoe of red-brick buildings around a central courtyard, a patch of green where kids kicked balls and men played soccer after work. It...

Read Story →

The Rain in the Attic

We moved in, and the house breathed. That’s the only way to describe it. It exhaled damp, wood-rot air through the floorboards, and every step we took seemed to make...

Read Story →

The Map on the Hallway Wall

When I was twenty-three, my old neighbor and fishing buddy, Ray, asked me to watch his place for the weekend while he and his wife, Dana, took their girls to...

Read Story →

The Cartographer’s Last Room

My grandmother left me this house—a sprawling, Victorian relic perched on a cliff above the Salton Sea. I’d visited as a child, when the salt was still wet and the...

Read Story →

The Gray and the Tall

In the humid Virginia summer of my twelfth year, our house on Cedar Lane became a stage for things that should not be. My stepmother, Ruth, insisted the kitchen was...

Read Story →

The Kitchen Timer

In the summer of 2011, my Aunt Rosa was in the hospital, recovering from a second open-heart surgery. She had barely survived the first, and the second was a desperate...

Read Story →

The Constant Visitor

Growing up, I always thought the old farmhouse we moved into when I was twelve was just drafty. But my little brother, Danny, saw things differently. Danny was only three,...

Read Story →

The Room at the Top of the Stairs

My sister-in-law, Diane, had just inherited a house from a distant uncle she barely knew. The place was a fixer-upper, but the price was right—almost too right. Our family gathered...

Read Story →

The Lantern’s Reach

I’m 19, and my cousin’s kid, Toby, is 6. When Mom and Dad took in Aunt Rita for her surgery, Toby came along to keep her company. My room, which...

Read Story →

The Threshold of Hay and Wire

In the autumn of 1996, when I was eight, my family moved to a red-clay farm in the foothills of the Appalachians. The house was a sagging Victorian with a...

Read Story →

The Gown in the Static

I was nine when the old television in my room started whispering. Not words, exactly, but a low hiss, like rain on a windowpane, or the sound of a faraway...

Read Story →

The Plaster Man

In the autumn of 2011, I moved into a cramped studio apartment in a converted Victorian house, hoping a change of scenery would ease the grief that had settled in...

Read Story →

The Cinder Man’s Table

The Maidenstone Inn sat at the edge of the village of Ashwick, a place so small that the post office doubled as the feed store. It was an old coaching...

Read Story →

The Blooming

In the summer of 2012, my great-aunt Edna, whom I called Auntie, passed away after a long illness. She was 78 and had lived alone in a small cottage on...

Read Story →

The Locked Door and the Faint Pitter-Patter

I never believed in ghosts until we moved into that prefabricated house on the outskirts of Blythe, Arizona. It was a new modular home, fresh off the truck, still smelling...

Read Story →

The Overalls in the Doorway

Every morning, the ritual was the same: stumble out of bed, pad down the hallway, and claim the bathroom before my brother could. The house we rented was old, with...

Read Story →

The Static-Faced Boy

The old farmhouse on Cedar Lane had always creaked and groaned, but that night the sounds were different. I was nine, sprawled on the threadbare rug in the living room,...

Read Story →