Ghost stories from Texas

The Last Bell

The house at 14 Meridian Lane was five years old when we moved in, a crisp white colonial with black shutters and a lawn that still smelled of fresh sod....

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The Ledger of the Departed

My brother Elias passed nineteen years ago, taken by a swift and vicious leukemia. In his final week, he began speaking to our mother, who had died a decade before....

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The Painted Window

The day we moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the salt marshes, I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the October wind. My husband,...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

Mara had lived in the coastal town of Duskhollow all her life, but she never felt at home there. The town was built on a cliff overlooking the churning sea,...

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The Hall of Salt and Rust

I’ve worked the night shift at St. Meridian’s Long-Term Care wing for three years now, and I’ve seen my share of oddities. But the strangest thing wasn’t a ghost or...

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The Lamp on the Linen Shelf

It was the summer of 2010 when my father’s sudden passing uprooted our lives, leaving my mother and me to share a cramped apartment in a sprawling complex on the...

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The Porcelain Choir

The day we moved into the old farmhouse, the realtor warned us about the plumbing. ‘It’s got a mind of its own,’ she said, chuckling, but her eyes were uneasy....

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The Unborn Twin

At twelve years old, I discovered a deep-buried secret in my mother’s medical records when she had a cancer scare. The records showed that I was meant to be a...

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The Salt and the Static

I was fifteen when my mother left me with her friend, Agnes, for a week while she went to a conference in the city. Agnes lived in a remote farmhouse...

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The Stillwater Portrait

Elena and I moved into the old farmhouse outside of Corbin’s Reach six months ago. It was a sprawling, drafty place with rooms that smelled of mothballs and forgotten time....

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The Weaver of Fates

Mara had always been drawn to the intricate patterns of the world—the way light fractured through a prism, the labyrinth of veins on a leaf, the mysterious geometry of a...

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The Clockwork Hum

It was the summer of 2001, and the house on Maple Street had settled into its nightly rhythm. The air was thick with the scent of pine from the furniture...

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The Weeping Statue of Marrow Falls

In the autumn of my seventeenth year, I was convinced that Elliot Ashford was the one. We had met online in a chatroom for obscure poetry, and our connection felt...

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The Stillness in the Crowd

My daughter Lena was seventeen when her brother Marcus took his own life. The grief hollowed me out, left me a shell that wandered the house at night, speaking to...

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The Indigo House on Maple Lane

Three years ago, my ex-husband and I moved our new family into a charming two-story house on Maple Lane. It was painted a deep indigo, and we lovingly called it...

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The Cobalt Hour

For three decades, I ran the busiest hardware supply depot in the industrial district of Port Arden, a grey city where the sky always seemed to be holding its breath....

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The Flower That Never Wilts

The walls of the pediatric clinic were a gallery of grief, each crayon drawing and watercolor a tiny monument to a child’s fear. Dr. Lena Marsh had grown accustomed to...

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The Maroon Room

The summer my daughter turned eight and my son was just beginning to hold his head up, I booked a weekend at the old Calvert House on the Oregon coast....

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The Lantern’s Last Light

The first time I saw the man with the lantern, I was twelve, standing at the edge of the Molasses Swamp, where the cypress knees jutted out of the black...

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The Night the Floor Sang

In the autumn of 1987, I was house-sitting a remote farmhouse in the middle of Nebraska, a place called the Holloway place, which had been empty for years. The owner,...

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The Pink Plastic Heels

It was the winter of my eighth year, and all I wanted for Christmas was a pair of those shiny, plastic high heels every girl on the playground was wearing....

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The Moth and the Lantern

When I was six, I woke to a strange hum in the dark, like a swarm of bees trapped behind the walls. It wasn’t until my eyes adjusted that I...

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The Bone Collector’s Apprentice

The last time I saw Marta, she was scrubbing the kitchen floor at three in the morning, her knuckles raw and bleeding, the bristles of the brush worn to a...

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The Static in the Cattails

When my brother Levi died in the spring of 2018, the world became a dull, gray place. He had lived with our younger brother, Ethan, and Ethan’s wife, Dana, on...

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