Ghost stories from Texas

The Corner Listener

The move back to Cedar Hill felt like a step backward in time. After five years of Florida’s humidity and citrus, the dry Texas heat and the endless stretch of...

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The Static in the Spare Room

Waking up on a Saturday used to feel like unwrapping a present. The sun would barely be a suggestion of gold on the horizon, and the house would hold its...

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The Banging Under the Floorboards

The summer I turned ten, my parents sent me and my brothers to stay with our grandparents in their old farmhouse outside of Wichita Falls. The house sat at the...

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The Weeping Wall

The house on Ashwood Lane wasn’t just ugly; it was aggressively plain, a squat rectangle of beige brick that seemed to apologize for existing. Inside, the walls were the color...

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The Dripping Threshold

It was the last Tuesday of June, the air thick and heavy like a damp blanket. My cousin and I, bored out of our minds, sat in his stuffy apartment...

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The Cold Press

I remember that night in late February, the sort of damp chill that settles into old brick and doesn’t let go. I had just finished a double shift at the...

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The Cake on Frosted Glass

It had been a long, sweltering summer in the dusty town of Marrow Junction, and the air inside the Grocery Barn was a welcome relief. My mom and I had...

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The Hollow Feast

It was the summer of ’74 when my father, Elias, was fourteen, and the world was all dusty fields and cicada song. We lived in a sagging farmhouse on the...

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The Wraith in the Crape Myrtle

The thing about August in the Texas Hill Country is the heat. It’s not just heat; it’s a wet blanket that clings to your skin, carrying the smell of cedar...

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The Phantom Dial Tone

I started at Northgate Dental Supplies on a crisp autumn Monday, eager to climb the corporate ladder. The perks were unbeatable: full medical, dental, vision, and a 401(k) match that...

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The Surveyor’s Mark

The town of Harrow’s Rest wasn’t even on most maps. It was a scattering of weather-beaten houses huddled around a general store and a church, where the only excitement was...

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The Lantern Man’s Return

The summer I turned nine, we moved to a dusty little town called Prickett’s Ford, where the heat clung to your skin like a wet shirt. Across the gravel road...

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The Flicker of the Vanishing Bulb

The Blue Ridge Motor Lodge had been a bustling vacation spot in the 1970s, but now it was just a forgotten strip of cracked asphalt and rusting cabins, swallowed by...

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The August House

After the dust of Nevada settled in my rearview, I landed back in the damp, mossy smell of my mother’s house in the Pacific Northwest. It was a Victorian relic,...

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The Cartographer’s Footnote

I had been hunting for a slim volume of nautical charts from the 18th century, tucked somewhere in the vast map archive of the Meridian Historical Society. The place was...

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The Lantern at Deadman’s Crossing

You should know, before anything else, that two of us write these entries—Aster and I. We’ve been best friends since we were kids, growing up in the scraggly outskirts of...

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The Rusted Gatekeeper

The summer air in Drayton Valley was a wet blanket, thick with the drone of cicadas and the smell of cut grass. I had just finished wrestling with the old...

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The Hovering

My father was a long-haul trucker, gone for weeks at a time, so during his absences, I would crawl into my mother’s bed, seeking the comfort of her warmth and...

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The Stove Timer’s Debt

The first time I noticed it, I was eleven, not twelve, and we lived in a two-story farmhouse in the middle of Iowa cornfields, not Corpus Christi. My parents had...

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The Night Shift at St. Aldric’s

The move had been a blur of cardboard boxes and borrowed pickup trucks. My apartment lease had ended in March, and I was halfway through spring semester when I found...

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The Hollow Man of Cinder Hills

I knew the moment we turned onto the gravel road that I’d made a mistake coming back. The house sat at the end of a long, unkempt drive, its windows...

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The Last Streetlight

In the autumn of 2004, I moved into a small rented cottage on the edge of a sprawling, unkempt field, about fifty yards from a lonely stretch of country road....

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The Pale Hitchhiker on County Road 12

This tale was passed down to me not from my father, but from my grandfather, who was a boy in the autumn of 1932. He had gone with his own...

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The Pen That Wrote Back

The first thing that happened was the pen. I was at the desk in my sister’s room, hunched over a half-finished essay for my summer online course. My sister had...

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