Ghost stories from Texas

The Static Man

The first time I saw the Static Man, I was eleven, riding home from my grandmother’s funeral in the back of my uncle’s old truck. It was a cold November...

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The Seventh Step

I was seven when we moved into the old coast guard station at Cape Meridian. The building had been decommissioned in the sixties, and for decades it had sat empty,...

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The Last Petal

The night Marta died, the air in our cottage on the edge of the marsh turned thick with the scent of lilies. Not the wild ones that grow by the...

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The Last Light on Hemlock Lane

The summer of 2015 was when my life quietly came apart. My wife had left me in May, taking our daughter with her to start a new life in another...

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The Constant Caller

I have always prided myself on my logical mind. I can dissect an argument, spot a logical fallacy from a mile away, and I’ve never been one to accept things...

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The Brass Chime

Marta had always found comfort in the late-night quiet of her grandmother’s attic apartment, a converted space above the old bakery that had been in her family for generations. The...

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The Salt-Glass Window

The day we pulled into the gravel lot of the Juniper Hollow Mobile Estates, I knew something was off. The sky was a bruised purple, even though it was only...

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The Last Sweater

I was sixteen when I went to the old Marrow house, a crumbling Victorian on the edge of Cinderfield, where the trees grew in twisted knots and the wind always...

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The Constant Turn

The summer I turned nine, we moved from the rusted trailer park into a two-story house that smelled of fresh paint and old wood. My father called it a fixer-upper,...

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The Locked Ward

The old Aldergate Asylum had been abandoned for decades, its halls still echoing with the whispers of the forgotten. My sisters, Clara and Mae, and I had inherited it from...

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The Rasp of the Wicker Gate

In the late summer of my fifteenth year, I woke to the pale grey of dawn filtering through the curtains of the attic bedroom I shared with my older brother,...

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The Moonlit Visitor

Three nights after the séance, I started seeing the figure. It began as a trick of the light, a smudge against the wallpaper in my grandmother’s lakeside cabin. The cabin...

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The Cargo Shelf

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had a weird knack for sensing things that aren’t there. Not ghosts exactly, but presences, like a cold breath on the back of...

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The Hollow Space Above

The house on Cinder Lane was a sprawling Victorian with a sagging porch and a roof that seemed to breathe. My family—my parents, my brothers Marcus and Eli, my sisters...

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The Persistent Tug

The first time it happened, I was nine, nestled in the too-soft mattress of my childhood bedroom at the edge of a dusty Nebraska town. A sharp, insistent tug on...

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The Static Between Stations

Maya had always been a magnet for the unseen, a living antenna for the dead. But in the two years since she’d moved into the crumbling Victorian house on Thornwood...

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The Pallid Guest

Every spring, our school shipped us off to the old Morrison House for a four-day service retreat. By day, we scraped paint off abandoned buildings or sorted donations in the...

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The Cucumber Vine

Our house sat on the edge of a man-made reservoir, a still, green body of water that had swallowed an old farmstead decades ago. The gated community around it was...

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The Salt Creek Incident

I moved into the old farmhouse on Salt Creek Road three years ago, drawn by the cheap rent and the promise of solitude. The house itself was a sagging Victorian...

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The Hollow Hall

My brother and I lived in a sprawling ranch house that sat alone at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by miles of pale, dry grass. Our nearest neighbors...

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The Twirling Blade

I was 16, it was a humid August afternoon, and the last school bus of the summer had just coughed me out at the end of the gravel driveway. The...

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The Sunday Vigil of the Hollow Moon

It was the tail end of February, and the thaw had begun in earnest, turning the dirt roads of our valley into a slick, reddish muck. My older sister, Marisol,...

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The Half-Wall Watcher

My name is Emily, and I’ve always been drawn to the strange. But nothing prepared me for what happened in my parents’ house in the sleepy town of Ravenswood, Ohio,...

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The Threshold of the Sixth Tenant

I was eleven when I first saw the woman in the green coat. We had just moved into the old Carmichael house, a three-story Victorian with a porch that sagged...

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