Ghost stories from Tennessee

The Pale Hound of Pemberton Lane

We’d been in the house on Pemberton Lane for three years when the midnight walks began. It wasn’t the house itself that unsettled me—it was the landing at the top...

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The Cold That Lingers

The bond between Clara and her sister June was one of those rare things that felt like fate had carved it from a single block of marble. They fought, yes,...

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The Static in the Drywall

I never believed in inherited hauntings, not really. My mother had her stories, but I chalked them up to a vivid imagination and drafty old houses. Then I moved into...

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The Terminal Gong

The first time I heard it, I was four, tucked into a narrow bed in a rented cottage that smelled of salt and old wood. My brother, Elias, slept across...

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The Porcelain Garden

I was eight when I met Mr. and Mrs. Albright, though I didn’t know their names then. They simply appeared one afternoon in the overgrown garden behind my aunt’s Victorian...

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The Iron Gate of Hillcrest

We moved to the old Harlow place when I was eleven, a sprawling Victorian with a wraparound porch and a yard that sloped up to the back of the Hillcrest...

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The Tally of Unfinished Hikes

I’m not going to name the trail, either. Call it the Raven’s Folly loop, a name that would have felt poetic before we learned what it actually meant. The property...

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The Creek That Takes

My father preaches at a small Baptist church in the hills of eastern Kentucky, a congregation of about forty souls who cling to the ridge like moss. I grew up...

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The Iron Harvest

I’d read the old field guides, the ones brittle with age, their pages smelling of dust and dried lavender. They said the raven was a messenger, a psychopomp, a guide...

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The Weeping Hollow

Grandma Hattie was the only grandparent I ever knew; my father’s parents had passed before I was born. We called her Gran, and she lived alone in the small desert...

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The Last Ferry to Mercer Island

The summer of ’67, the year I turned eighteen, was thick with the smell of diesel and salt off the ferry docks. Mercer Island was our world, a speck of...

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The Perpetual Ring

The last time I saw my brother Carl, he was laughing, his dry, barking laugh that always made me feel lighter. He had insisted on a last-minute camping trip to...

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The Covering

At nineteen, I lived in a cramped attic apartment on the edge of the city, where the rent was cheap and the walls were thin. My bedroom was a converted...

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The Wallpaper’s Witness

Our cross-country drive from the sun-baked outskirts of Tampa to my brother’s new place outside of Louisville was a test of patience and bladder control. With two kids and a...

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The Last Message

The old house on Maple Street had a peculiar way of holding onto things. It wasn’t just the dust that clung to every surface or the creaking floorboards that sang...

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The Woman in the Garden

When my daughter Lily and I first saw the house on Hemlock Lane, I felt a strange pull toward it, despite its sagging porch and peeling paint. It was a...

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The Grain and the Gable

My grandmother’s hands were always moving, even when she sat still. She’d pluck at her apron, smooth the worn denim over her knees, trace the grain of the oak table...

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The Fourth Bedroom

The house on Maple Street was a rebuke to the gloomy apartment blocks that surrounded it. It was a Victorian relic, all gingerbread trim and bay windows, and my parents...

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The Cinder Vein

We moved from a cramped two-bedroom in Phoenix to a sprawling new development on the edge of a high desert valley in New Mexico. The houses were all identical, cookie-cutter...

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The Floating Fry Boxes

When I was six and my brother was three, we lived in a cramped mobile home on the edge of a dying town. The walls were thin, the floor sloped,...

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The Clockwork Dancer

My grandmother kept the music box on the top shelf of the hallway cabinet, a place I wasn’t allowed to reach. It was a delicate thing, a porcelain ballerina in...

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The Cinder Room

It began with a lock of hair. I know that sounds like the opening of some dime-store novel, but that’s how our group, the Hollow Creek Investigators, got its start....

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