Ghost stories from Virginia

The Cardboard Smile

In the autumn of 1987, I was eight years old, living in a weathered farmhouse on the edge of a cornfield that stretched like a sea of gold under the...

Read Story →

The Ninth House

My name is Elias, and I’ve spent most of my adult life in transit. Nine addresses in fourteen years, each one a stopgap, a stepping stone to somewhere else. I...

Read Story →

The Silent Hive

In the autumn of that year, I moved into a quaint but aging farmhouse on the outskirts of a town that had seen better days. The house had stood empty...

Read Story →

The Basement Bell

The day we moved into the old Hartley house, the air itself felt heavy, like the walls were sweating out decades of secrets. My husband, Tom, and I had been...

Read Story →

The Forty-Foot Loop

The USS Wexford was a slender blade of gray steel slicing through the North Atlantic, a mere 509 feet of reverberating metal and diesel fumes. With a crew of 250,...

Read Story →

The Candle in the Oak Grove

The first time we went hunting for something beyond the veil, it wasn’t in some crumbling asylum or a battlefield soaked in old blood. It was a Tuesday night in...

Read Story →

The Grout Between the Tiles

Our flat on the fourth floor of a pre-war building in the city had a particular smell, a mix of old wood and damp plaster that clung to everything. My...

Read Story →

The Bell Jar of Seaford

Seaford was a town of red brick and rusted iron, huddled on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. It had survived the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Fire...

Read Story →

The Grid in the Dark

I’m 47 now, and I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for most of my adult life, first in Portland, then up the coast to a small town called Netarts Bay....

Read Story →

The Painted Fan

Mara was four, with a serious face and a habit of stating facts that made her mother’s skin prickle. She had long, dark hair that fell like a curtain over...

Read Story →

The Hum of the Overhead Lines

At sixteen, I was sleeping over at my friend Delia’s place in the dusty farm town of Morrow, where the only road, County Road 9, cut straight through cornfields and...

Read Story →

The Weight of Stillness

My name is Clara, and I never believed in the old stories about the house on Bramble Lane. It was a narrow, two-story colonial tucked between identical neighbors in a...

Read Story →

The Dry Well

My grandmother had a superstition about dry wells. She said they were hungry mouths, always waiting for something to fall in. I never paid much mind until we moved into...

Read Story →

The Empty Pantry

The smell of fresh paint and sawdust still clung to the air when Lena and Marcus first stepped through the front door of their new home. It was a modest...

Read Story →

The Bleached Field

I was sixteen when my father decided to take the old County Line Road to my grandmother’s farm. It was a route we’d driven a hundred times, a ribbon of...

Read Story →

The Courtyard Light

I never thought I’d be one of those people who talk to streetlights. But here I am, every morning at 5:45 AM, mumbling to a flickering bulb on Maple Court....

Read Story →

The Last Picket

The autumn of 1988 had painted the hills of northern Hardy County in shades of rust and gold. I was driving alone on a narrow, winding road that cut through...

Read Story →

The Third Floor Landing

I never thought much about the layout of our new house, a narrow Victorian with a split staircase that curved like a serpent’s spine. The third floor was mostly unused,...

Read Story →