Ghost stories from Texas

The Lantern in the Junkyard

At ten, I thought I understood the dark. My grandmother, Ruth, and I had spent the evening hunting for a Halloween costume that didn’t smell like mothballs or have a...

Read Story →

The Last Chill of Dying

I never believed in cold spots. Not really. I’d heard the stories, the way people’s breath would fog in a patch of air that felt like a deep freezer door...

Read Story →

The Copper Pan Chime

The old farmhouse on Mulberry Lane had stood for over a century, its bones weathered by the harsh prairie winds and its walls steeped in generations of memory. I’d moved...

Read Story →

The Hollow Wall

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. But there are some things that happen in this world that defy explanation, and the thing in my room is one of them....

Read Story →

The Constant Glow

In the autumn of 1998, my father and his new wife bought an old farmhouse on the outskirts of a quiet town in upstate New York. The place had been...

Read Story →

The Clock at Half Past One

In the autumn of 2006, I was staying at my aunt’s farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, a place where the fields stretched like gray oceans under the vast Nebraska...

Read Story →

The Lavender Gate

Three autumns ago, I began taking the long way to the mill, along the old county road that skirted the marsh. It added ten minutes to my drive, but I...

Read Story →

The Convection Current

I’ve been lurking on this forum for years, but I never thought I’d have anything to share. Then the drafting table in my new apartment started rearranging itself. Let me...

Read Story →

The Salt Line

I don’t believe in ghosts. I never have. My grandma used to tell me stories about spirits and hauntings, but they were just stories to scare kids into behaving. So...

Read Story →

The Pallid Bloom

Our new house stood at the edge of the pines, a split-level rectangle of fresh lumber and unweathered paint. The yard was a raw wound of red clay, studded with...

Read Story →

The Sapphire Gaze

I’ve lived in this old farmhouse for twelve years now, ever since my wife passed. The solitude suits me, or so I thought. This past autumn, a peculiar stillness crept...

Read Story →

The Closet in the Red Hallway

Six months after I married Vera, the Army finally sent me to Fort Sandoval, a sun-bleached installation in the high desert of New Mexico. She and her son, Leo, had...

Read Story →

The Wallpaper in Room 7

I’ve always had a strange connection to the unexplained, but nothing prepared me for what happened in that newly built hotel on the outskirts of Millbrook. It was a sprawling,...

Read Story →

The Burnt Ash Garden

The summer I turned twelve, my family moved to a derelict farmhouse at the edge of Moss Creek, a town so small it didn’t even have a stoplight. The house...

Read Story →

The Rusted Angel

I’m not the kind of person who believes in ghosts. I’m a scientist, a researcher, trained to look for empirical evidence. But there are things that logic can’t explain, and...

Read Story →

The Constant Visitor

I moved into the old farmhouse on the outskirts of Willow Creek in the autumn of 2012. The house had been vacant for years, and the realtor had been eager...

Read Story →

The Red Dust Road

I remember the summer before I turned six, when the heat over the Barrens made the air shimmer like water. We lived in a dusty little town called Dry Wells,...

Read Story →

The Salt on the Windowsill

The first night in the old farmhouse, we were all too tired to unpack properly. My stepfather, Dale, had insisted we move in immediately, even though the place needed work....

Read Story →

The Relay Station Vigil

In 2004, I was a sophomore at Ridgemont High. For gym, Coach Brannigan, a squat, red-faced man with a whistle permanently fused to his lips, marched us to the abandoned...

Read Story →

The Salted Grove

We’d been in Bakersfield for barely a month when my husband’s job fell apart. The plant manager, a man named Gerald, took one look at Miguel’s surname and the way...

Read Story →

The Wallpaper in the Lavender Room

When my grandmother’s health began to fail, our family packed up our lives in Ohio and drove west to the arid plains of New Mexico, not Texas, to care for...

Read Story →

The Knife Sharpener’s Hum

In 1992, I was working the prep station at the Golden Harvest Family Restaurant, a sprawling buffet-style joint on the edge of Bakersfield. My station was a narrow alley between...

Read Story →

The Knocker at Rosewood Lane

My family moved into the old Hargrove place on Rosewood Lane in the fall of 2004. It was a sprawling Victorian that had been on the market for years, and...

Read Story →

The Seventh Night of Advent

It was three Decembers after the fire at the old Hargrove Mill, and we had finally settled into the new house on Cedar Lane. The place was modest, with a...

Read Story →