Ghost stories from Texas

The Unplugged Jukebox

Mara had always felt the weight of Gran’s farmhouse, a sagging Victorian that smelled of old wood and dust. It was the kind of place where every creak and groan...

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The Crying Ditch

In the arid outskirts of Las Cruces, New Mexico, where the desert meets the scrubland and the irrigation ditches run like veins through the hard earth, lived the Ortega family....

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The Paint-Peeled Room

I never liked the room at the end of the upstairs hall in Aunt Cora’s farmhouse. The door was always slightly ajar, and the wallpaper peeled in long, brittle strips...

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The Carpet’s Constellations

The night air in my inherited flat above the old map shop carried the scent of aged paper and dust that never quite settled. I had been cataloging the previous...

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The Weight of Ledger

The house on Hemlock Lane had stood since 1947, its brick facade darkened by decades of rain and soot. Milo and his mother moved in with his stepfather, Gordon, a...

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The Boy in the Garden

My family moved into the old farmhouse when I was twelve, and my mother, a painter, was thrilled by the overgrown garden and the way the light slanted through the...

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The Coal-Dusted Crossing

My cousin Elena and I had heard the stories from our grandmother about the abandoned mining town of Black Hollow, tucked deep in the Appalachians. The tale went that a...

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The Iron Chime of Saint Elara

The incident with the shadow in the hallway and the tapping that followed had left me shaken, but I’d managed to convince myself it was just the old house settling....

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The Final Tenant

The sprawling Oakwood Terrace complex had seen better days, its once-pristine facades now cracked and stained by years of neglect. My aunt, Carol, managed the office, and I often visited...

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The Last Ferryman’s Call

At the age of eleven, I spent the summer at my great-aunt Marguerite’s farmhouse, nestled in the hills of the Appalachian foothills. She had been diagnosed with a wasting illness...

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The Blue Door of 1417

The first time I noticed it, I thought I was seeing things. It was a Tuesday, and the rain had been drumming against the windows of our rented brick house...

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The Gatekeeper’s Playdate

It began in the autumn of 2012, when our only companion was a scruffy Border Collie named Milo. Milo had a peculiar habit: every evening, we’d hear him on the...

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The Fridge on the Porch

Last summer, I stopped being a skeptic. There was an abandoned house across the creek from my cousin’s cottage, a place we called Old Man Thorne’s place. Thorne had been...

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The Wicker Gate

My name is Elara, and I’ve lived in my late grandmother’s cottage at the edge of the marsh for three months now. The place has a way of holding onto...

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The Marrow of the House

The old farmhouse on Marrow Lane had stood empty for years, its bones sagging into the Iowa soil like a tired animal. My family moved in last autumn, seeking a...

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The Constant Visitor

The first time I saw it, I thought it was a trick of the light. A flicker in the corner of my eye, a shadow that didn’t move when I...

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The Amber Room

The day we moved into the house on Maple Street, I was six. It was a brand-new construction, all sharp corners and that particular smell of fresh paint and sawdust....

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The Frost Pattern on the Window

At seventeen, I worked the late shift at a twenty-four-hour bakery, frosting layer cakes in the back while the fluorescent lights hummed like trapped flies. My sleep schedule was a...

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The Cane’s Last Stroke

Old Man Hargrove had always been a man of routine. Every morning at six, he’d creak down the stairs of his two-story farmhouse, his knees complaining louder than the floorboards,...

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The Breaker’s Lament

The rain had been falling since noon, a steady, gray drizzle that turned the gravel driveway into a slick, dark ribbon. I was alone, or as alone as I could...

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The Pantry’s Reckoning

At sixteen, I thought I knew fear—the kind that comes from a poorly lit hallway or a creaking floorboard. But nothing prepared me for the winter my family moved into...

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The Pigment Vigil

In the sweltering August of my sixteenth year, my father and I repainted the guest bedroom of our creaking Victorian in Portland, Maine. The color was a deep, arterial red—’Oxblood,’...

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Pelt and Static

The house on Maple Hollow Lane had always breathed with a certain rhythm. I knew its sighs, its creaks, the way it settled at dusk like an old dog. I’d...

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The Grin in the Static

The white noise of the TV filled the cramped apartment, a familiar hum that usually lulled me into a false sense of security. It was my twenty-third birthday, but the...

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