Ghost stories from Texas

The Lantern’s Debt

The old homestead sat on a dead-end dirt road that had once been a logging spur for the Shady Pines Lumber Company. By the time I inherited the place from...

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The Carbide Night

The summer I turned eleven, we moved to the outskirts of Painted Post, New York, into a house that smelled of old dust and forgotten things. My room was at...

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My sister-in-law, Lena, and her boyfriend, Marcus, moved in with us about two years ago, bringing their three kids: six-year-old Ivy, three-year-old Oliver, and two-year-old Sophie. At first, it was...

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The Balcony That Watches

In the industrial sprawl north of the city, where the hum of the freeway is a constant, indifferent lullaby, stands a seven-story monolith of glass and steel. It was known...

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The Locked Glass

It had been five years since I last saw the hooded thing in the mirror of that cramped one-bedroom on Vine Street. I’d convinced myself it was a trick of...

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The Last Winter at Larkhill

When I moved to Larkhill, the realtor called it a ‘fixer-upper with character.’ The house sat at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by bare maples that clawed at...

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The Saltwater Room

I was fifteen when my parents bought the old Cranston place, a sprawling Victorian that had sat empty for a decade, its windows like hollow eyes staring out at the...

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The Porcelain Lady of Marrow Lane

The summer I turned six, we rented a cramped bungalow on Marrow Lane, a dead-end street bordered by a deep, tangled wood. Directly across from us stood the old Pemberton...

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The Looming Static

At seven, I woke to a pressure in the room, a heaviness that made the air feel thick as syrup. My eyes found the corner where the ceiling met the...

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The Lantern on the Marsh

My sister Elara passed away eleven years ago, consumed by a sudden illness that left us all reeling. I was nineteen, just starting college, and the grief was a raw,...

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The Hallway Finger

I was twenty-one, and my father and I had just moved into a cramped two-bedroom flat above a closed laundromat on the outskirts of Bakersfield, California. The previous tenant, an...

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The Third Hour

I’d been devouring a series of grimdark fantasy novels, the kind where ancient curses and forgotten gods lurk between the pages. That night, I’d finished the second book and started...

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The Last Thanksgiving

My husband and I had been together for a decade, and his mother, Eleanor, had always been the spark of every family gathering. Her laugh echoed through rooms, and her...

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The Cinder Room

My brother and I, we were two halves of the same soul, or so I’d always believed. Growing up in the narrow, fog-swallowed streets of a coastal town, we shared...

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The Static Call

It was the summer of 2014 when I started my new job at a call center in the sleepy town of Millbrook, Oregon. The building was a repurposed textile mill,...

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The Bone-Gift

It was the summer I turned nine, and my family moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of Larkspur Hollow, a place so far from our cramped city apartment...

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The Invisible Playmate’s Nap

The first time I noticed it was at breakfast. My granddaughter, Lily, had just turned two in February, and we were all sitting around the kitchen table, our new house...

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The Lantern Room

The summer I turned nine, my grandmother, Abuela Rosa, died of a sudden stroke, and my family packed our bags for the long drive from the dusty plains of Oklahoma...

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The Hum Behind the Wall

I was nineteen when my grandmother’s will left me the key to a brick row house in the old milling district of Grayhaven. The town had once been a thriving...

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The Cinder Ledger

I had carried the remnants of a stranger’s life into my dorm room, a charred shoebox containing a diary and a porcelain doll whose face was cracked like a spiderweb....

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The Ash-Wreathed Visitor

I was sixteen, lying in my narrow bed in the attic room of my aunt’s old farmhouse. The room had a single dormer window that faced the barn, and the...

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The Hollow Nursery

The summer I turned nine, my Aunt Marguerite traded her sensible sedan for a rust-colored pickup truck that smelled of hay and old coffee, and we began our weekly escapes...

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The Last Ashfall

I was sorting through my grandmother’s abandoned farmhouse in the high desert, a place that had been locked up since her death three years prior. My family had finally decided...

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