Ghost stories from Virginia

The Foxglove Lullaby

In the winter of 1995, my mother’s antiques business sent out a promotional mailer to celebrate the opening of her new shop in the hills of western Virginia. The mailer...

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The Red Barn Murmurs

I have kept this locked in my chest for twenty years, never speaking it aloud beyond the walls of my own mind. I’m a retired schoolteacher now, living alone in...

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The Linen Closet

The house on Maple Street was always just a house. A modest ranch with pale yellow siding and a porch that sagged slightly on the left, it was the kind...

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The Static Between Tenants

My name is Elias, and for most of my life, I’ve been a skeptic. Ghost stories were for children and the gullible. But that changed when I was sixteen, in...

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The Man in the Basement

I never believed in the supernatural until I moved into the old brownstone on Beacon Street in Boston. It was a cramped, creaking place that my girlfriend, Clara, had inherited...

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The Lazarus Pager

In the autumn of 2003, my world had settled into a quiet routine after the sudden loss of my fiancé, Adrian, in a car crash that the police ruled as...

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The Stairwell’s Debt

I was only seven when the house on Maple Hollow started to feel wrong. It wasn’t the creaking pipes or the drafty windows—I was used to those. It was the...

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The Salted Veil

The night air was thick with the smell of pine and wet asphalt as I followed Lucas’s taillights down the old logging road. My heart was a wild drum against...

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The Fading of the Hallway Light

The bus groaned to a halt at the edge of a gravel parking lot, and the camp counselors barked for us to form a single line. We were in the...

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The Cobblestone Playmates

I hadn’t logged into this forum in months, mainly because of what happened at the old mill town. You see, I’m part of a traveling history club that visits historical...

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The Hollow Key

Three weeks after the fire that took the old chapel, I still couldn’t sleep past two in the morning. So when I got up for a glass of water, I...

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The Cartographer’s Parlor Game

In the autumn of 1994, I was a sophomore at Thornfield University, majoring in folklore and minoring in cartography. My friend Leo, a lanky art history student, lived with three...

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The Tin Music Box

The house on Maple Hollow Lane was a sturdy thing, built in 1923 with a gambrel roof and a porch that sagged like a tired hound. My stepfather, Arnold, called...

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The Last Broadcast

The last time I saw my father, he was standing in the doorway of our apartment, holding a small transistor radio that my mother had given him for his birthday....

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The Hollow Crossing

It was a late October evening, and the air had that sharp, metallic bite that precedes the first hard frost. My stepsister, Clara, and I were driving home from a...

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The Lantern’s Gaze

My husband, Carl, has always scoffed at the supernatural. ‘No such thing as ghosts,’ he’d say, his tone as solid as the steel he worked with. I never argued, but...

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The Tall Man in the Utility Closet

I’ve carried two encounters with me like splinters under the skin, each one festering in a different corner of my memory. The first happened in the autumn of 1987, when...

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The Wake of the Gilded Seam

The Bexley house had stood at the edge of the marsh for over a century, its bones soaked with salt and sorrow. I’d rented it for the summer, drawn by...

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The Clockwork Hum

My name is Elara, and I’ve lived in this house all my fourteen years. It’s an old Victorian on the edge of a town that time forgot, with a wraparound...

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The Cinder Box

The box sat on the mantle like a squat black toad, its brass corners tarnished to a sickly green. Inside were Grandma Hattie’s ashes, though ‘ashes’ felt like a lie;...

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The Cloth Merchant’s Bargain

I first met Mr. Alistair on a Tuesday, during the annual autumn market in the village of Thornwick. He was a tall, gaunt man with a thin mustache and a...

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The Linen Closet at 3:33

The rental cottage on the coast of Maine was a last-minute escape from a city summer, and Eleanor was grateful for its creaking floors and salt-worn windows. She had always...

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The 5:04 Visitor

I’ve never been one to believe in the supernatural, but what happened that morning has shattered every rational thought I’ve ever had. My nerves are still frayed, and I can...

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The Man in the Motorized Cart

At my friend Mara’s grandmother’s funeral, the air was thick with grief and the smell of lilies. After the burial, the family gathered at her Aunt Delia’s sprawling farmhouse for...

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