Ghost stories from Texas

The L-Shaped Hall

At sixteen, I thought I knew fear. I’d devoured horror novels, marathon-watched scary movies, and even braved a haunted hayride with my cousins. But nothing prepared me for the summer...

Read Story →

The Stairwell’s Arithmetic

My name is Elias Thorne, and this is the account of the house on Hemlock Row. We called it the Arithmetic House, not for any love of numbers, but because...

Read Story →

The Locked Ward

I’m writing this from a motel room on the outskirts of a small town in the Pacific Northwest, where I’ve been holed up for the past three days. I need...

Read Story →

The Face at the Window

Three months after my grandfather passed, I still found myself reaching for the phone to call him with some trivial question about the garden or the old clock he’d left...

Read Story →

The Weight of Unspoken Things

The year I turned seven, we moved into a single-wide trailer at the edge of a dried-up lakebed called Salt Flats. The name was a kind of joke, because there...

Read Story →

The Hollow Door

The summer I turned eleven, Grandpa Ray hired me as his official gopher. We lived in a little house at the edge of a town that used to be a...

Read Story →

The Weeping Porcelain

I had never given much thought to the things that go bump in the night, not really. As a kid, I was more scared of the dark than of ghosts,...

Read Story →

The Half-Formed Morning

I wasn’t planning on telling this story. It isn’t particularly thrilling or original, and you might even call it common. But I’ve shared a few of my experiences before, so...

Read Story →

The Vigil by the Lavender Bush

I have only ever told this to two people, and both times I felt a chill creep down my spine as I spoke, as if the memory itself was a...

Read Story →

The Hollow Addition

Before I turned ten, we lived in a house that had been stitched together by my grandfather and my uncles. They’d tacked on a bedroom and a living room, sloppy...

Read Story →

The Salt and the Stone

In the autumn of that year, my brother Ivo and I moved into a rented farmhouse on the edge of the Cattail Marsh. The place had been vacant for a...

Read Story →

The Face in the Vent

It started with a smell—something like burnt copper and wet ash—drifting from the bedroom vent whenever the heat kicked on. My apartment had always been drafty, with pipes that moaned...

Read Story →

The Gauge in the Attic

I was never one to believe in the supernatural, not even as a child. My name is Elias Thorne, and I was a technician at the Port Meridian Weather Station,...

Read Story →

The Rain in the Glass

The first thing I noticed when we moved into the old farmhouse was the way the rain sounded on the tin roof. It was a comforting patter, a white noise...

Read Story →

The Silent Static

The rain had been drumming against the windowpanes of my grandfather’s old farmhouse for three days straight. I’d come down with a fever that wouldn’t break, so my mom shipped...

Read Story →

The Man Who Stole the Silence

It was the summer my family moved into the old farmhouse on Kelp Road, a place that seemed to swallow the light. The house had three bedrooms, but my stepfather...

Read Story →

The Static in the Smoke Detector

Mara’s earliest memory was of a flicker at the edge of her vision. She’d be playing with her plastic dinosaurs on the shag carpet of the den, and the air...

Read Story →

The Last Stop Before Midnight

The sign was a flickering green glow against the black Texas sky, promising fuel, food, and rest. It was nearly 1 AM, and I was six hours out of El...

Read Story →

The Rusted Gate

The summer I turned twelve, my parents packed us into the old station wagon and drove six hours north to the town of Merrow’s Rest. The house they’d rented for...

Read Story →

The Hollow Mannequin

The summer of 1998 was a furnace over the Texas plains, but our unit was heading to the field for a week of gunnery drills. I was a driver for...

Read Story →

The Grocery List

I never thought much about the recurring dream. It was just another oddity in a life full of them, a life spent in the quiet backwater of Clover Creek, where...

Read Story →

The Painted Child

The old observatory perched on the hill had been converted into a lecture hall, its domed ceiling still scarred with the tracks of a former telescope. Dr. Aris, a man...

Read Story →

The Whispering Pines

We moved into the old Harlow place in the fall of that year, when the leaves were turning and the wind had a bite to it. The house sat at...

Read Story →

The Man in the Linen Closet

When our second child was on the way, my wife and I knew we needed more room. My mother-in-law, Claire, had just inherited a property from her late aunt, a...

Read Story →