Ghost stories from Texas

The Lantern’s Reach

Elena never believed in ghosts. She was a practical woman, a retired nurse who had seen enough of life and death to know that the dead stayed dead. But when...

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The Hollow Under the Floor

I never believed in the supernatural until I spent a weekend at my friend Mara’s farmhouse. It was the summer I turned fourteen, and her family had just moved from...

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The Blue Chair’s Debt

The day I agreed to help my great-aunt Mabel, I expected to deal with old furniture and distant memories. She’d called me in a state, saying that the armchair in...

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The summer I turned forty, my daughter Maya and I spent our evenings binge-watching paranormal investigation shows. She was seventeen, already obsessed with the supernatural. We’d laugh at the overacting,...

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The Cracking Coil

I was clearing out the overgrown corner of my yard last September, the one behind the old equipment shed my grandfather had built in the sixties. The property backs onto...

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The Static Hour

In the autumn of 2001, I was living in a small farmhouse outside of Hillsdale, Minnesota. The nearest neighbor was a quarter mile down a gravel road, and the only...

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The Waterlogged Chorus

The old civic pool had been closed for decades, but the high school drama club still used its crumbling basement as a makeshift theatre, accessing it through a rusted service...

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The Violet Hour

I have always been a creature of the in-between, a woman who walks with one foot in the mundane and the other in the unseen. As a practicing witch, ghosts...

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The Salt of the Earth

I was seven when my parents traded the city’s noise for a patch of dirt that promised quiet. The land stretched two and a half acres, a green rectangle swallowed...

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The Weaver of Static

It wasn’t the first time something had crawled into my sleep, but it was the first time it stayed. I was nineteen, working the night shift at a 24-hour diner...

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The Missing Pages

Maya and Tom had just relocated from the frozen tundra of northern Michigan to the sun-drenched coastal town of Salton Shores, Florida. The arrangement was simple: live rent-free in Tom’s...

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The Keyhole at Coldwater Abbey

My friend Lena and I drove four hours from the coast to visit the ruins of Coldwater Abbey, a former monastery that had been abandoned since the 1800s. Lena’s boyfriend,...

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The Frequency of Silence

The day we moved into the old farmhouse, the air smelled of dust and dried lavender. My wife, Clara, and I had bought the place with dreams of a quiet...

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The Cinder-Filled Hall

We thought the old farmhouse was a steal. The price was laughable, the land was generous, and the structure, though weathered, had a certain somber charm. The realtor, a nervous...

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The Grinding of the Gears

I am aware that what I am about to relate strains credulity, that it may be dismissed as the product of an overworked mind or a penchant for the macabre....

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The Counter Girl

The morning routine was a familiar knot of anxiety. Marisol always felt a prickle at the back of her neck, a sensation of being watched, but she’d learned to ignore...

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The Static in the Corn

The drive out to Lake Monahaw had been a joke. Four of us packed into Maya’s ancient Chevrolet, the AC wheezing out lukewarm air that smelled of dust and old...

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The Second Moon

When Margo’s fiancé, Derek, left her for his ex, she thought the world had ended. But then her best friend, Priya, and Priya’s husband, Leo, insisted on a distraction. They...

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The Hollow Keepsake

The summer of 2011 was when my cousin’s children came to stay with us, and I remember the heat clung to the air like a wet blanket. My sister, Lila,...

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The Choir of the Fading Light

In the coastal town of San Elias, where the Pacific mist clung to the cliffs like a shroud, young Marta lived with her mother and grandmother in a house that...

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The Kiln’s Thirst

In the autumn of 2002, my husband Arthur and I moved our young twins, Milo and Clara, to the small town of Ashford, tucked in the rolling hills of Vermont....

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The Worn Slipper

The first thing I noticed about the house on Juniper Lane was the feeling that it was watching me. It was a two-story colonial with peeling white paint and a...

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The Mud Room

I was fifteen when my parents dragged me from the soggy green of Oregon to the baked brown of west Kansas. I remember the day we pulled into Hoxie, the...

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The Salted Fields

I have been putting this off for weeks. When I finally made my list of experiences to document, I wrote her name down as ‘The Woman in the Field’. Just...

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