Ghost stories from Virginia

The Crinkling of Empty Hours

The motel room on the edge of Branson, Missouri, smelled of stale cigarette smoke and cheap disinfectant. I’d driven sixteen hours from Phoenix, my eyes gritty and my grief wrapped...

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The Vinyl Scratch

The day had been a blur of fluorescent lights and the drone of a thousand conversations at the county fair. I, Mara, had spent it helping my aunt at her...

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The Resonance of Unfinished Work

This is difficult to put into words, even now, years later, with the memory as sharp as a shard of glass in my mind. It started in the autumn of...

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The Kerosene Lamp

Old Mrs. Harlow had always been particular about the lights in the farmhouse, but after her husband, Ezra, passed, the house itself seemed to adopt his habits. He had been...

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The Static Between Floors

It began three weeks after I moved into the third-floor walkup on Peachtree Street, a narrow building wedged between a laundromat and a shuttered bakery. I’d taken the place for...

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The Static Between Floors

Last night, the elevator in our apartment building finally gave up. It had been stuttering for weeks, a metallic groan that echoed through the stairwell like a dying animal. I’d...

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The Gurgle of the Drain

The first time I noticed it, I was six, standing on the cold linoleum of our rented bungalow in the coastal town of Grayford. The bathroom was small, with a...

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The Porcelain Witness

I’m 16 and I’ve lived my whole life in this dusty Arizona town, where the sun scorches the earth and the air tastes like copper. My familiar wasn’t a cat;...

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The Blue Sweater

The house at 14 Marrow Lane had always been a place of quiet unease, but for Lena, it was simply home. She had inherited it from her grandfather, a kind...

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The Tin Jangle

The last time I saw my father, I was eight, clutching a stuffed rabbit while he loaded a suitcase into a cab. He didn’t look back. Twenty-five years later, a...

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The Fifth Window

Elena was four years old when her family moved into the old Crayford house on Hemlock Lane, a narrow, ivy-strangled street that coiled away from the town’s main road. The...

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Unseen Connections

After many years apart from my mother, I received the news of her death. My brother and I, along with two of our cousins, gathered to honor her at the...

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The Unburdened

The salt spray of the Atlantic clung to Elias’s skin, a familiar caress he’d known since childhood summers spent at the lighthouse his grandfather tended. This year, however, the air...

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The Foyer’s Breath

The old paper mill town of Ashford had a peculiar charm, but the moment I stepped into the third-floor walk-up at 19 Wexler Street, I felt a kind of pressure,...

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The Boy Who Knew Tomorrow

One summer afternoon, my parents took my sister and me to the community lake. While they set up our picnic lunch, I wandered to the small dock to skip stones....

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The Rasp in the Corn

Milo had always dismissed the tales about the old Hendricks farm as rural superstition, but after three months in the creaking farmhouse on Cedar Lane, he found himself parked at...

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The Chalk Mark

Marla had lived in the same small apartment above a laundromat in Duluth for twenty years. It was a place of gray skies and cold winds, but she preferred it...

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The Empty Hall

When I first moved into Elias’s house, I dismissed the creaks and groans of the old structure as the normal settling of a century-old farmhouse. But the new addition—a clean,...

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5 Bed House With Cheap Rent

Back when I was a young, broke college student, a friend and I thought we had stumbled upon the deal of a lifetime: A huge 5 bedroom house with 2...

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The Lantern Man’s Ledger

My wife, Elara, and I had grown tired of city life, so when the opportunity came to manage a remote forest ranger station in the Cascade foothills, we jumped at...

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The Unpainted Door

When Mira and I bought the old Victorian on Cedar Hill, we were thrilled. It was a fixer-upper, but we had plenty of time and energy. We’d just moved from...

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The Reverse-Knee Walker

The rain had been falling for three days straight, turning the ground into a thick, sucking mud that clung to everything. Sarah stood at the window of the old farmhouse,...

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The Porcelain Gate

The house on Hemlock Lane was our pride, a modern construction of glass and steel that we had designed ourselves. It stood on a plot of land that had been...

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The Ironwood Hollow

It was mid-October, the semester just past its halfway point, when a man named Arthur stopped me in the library. He pointed at my faded band tee, a group that...

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