Ghost stories from Virginia

The Bone-Bright Line

You have to understand that what I am about to tell you really happened, though many will believe it did not. I will be honest with you, as I do...

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The Perpetual Residents of Ashford House

The summer I turned thirteen, I spent a month at my grandmother’s boarding house in the dusty town of Ashford, while my parents sorted out their separation. The house, a...

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The Lamplighter’s Lament

The old Mapleton High was a monument to forgotten promises. Its brick facade, stained by decades of rain, hulked over the football field like a sleeping beast. But the real...

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The Loom and the Snooze Button

In 1989, my wife Elena and I moved our family into a clapboard duplex on the edge of the salt marshes, a place where the sea fog rolled in like...

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The Salt of the Earth

My wife, Eleanor, and I bought the old farmhouse in the Shenandoah Valley eleven years ago. The house itself was a sturdy brick affair from the 1980s, but the land...

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The Hallway’s Empty Turn

My name is Lena, and I’m fifteen now, but this happened when I was fourteen, back in the dead of winter last year. I know I wasn’t dreaming or losing...

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The Last Lantern in Langhorne

I still get a chill when I tell this story, though it happened over a year ago. My family had been renting the same cottage on the coast of Maine...

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The Room with No Scent

When we bought the old farmhouse on Juniper Lane, we thought we were getting a fresh start. The place had stood empty for years, its bones solid beneath layers of...

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The Antlered Hollow

I was twelve, and my dad had just taken me to my first big concert: a doom metal band called Grieving Earth. The sound had rattled my bones, and the...

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The Toy Box Under the Window

My earliest memory isn’t a birthday party or a visit from a relative. It’s the toy box under the window in my nursery at the old farmhouse my parents rented...

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The Painted Door

In the autumn of 2012, I was a senior in high school, and my friends and I had a habit of testing the supernatural. My best friend, Clara, had a...

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The Counter of Empty Plates

The first thing I noticed that year was the quiet. Usually, our house hummed with the clatter of pots and the murmur of my mother’s family arriving early. But that...

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The Still Watcher by the Reeds

Three weeks after we moved into the old farmhouse, I found myself standing at the edge of the marsh that bordered our property. My brother, Leo, was supposed to be...

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The Chalkboard Ledger

I was eleven when I started keeping the ledger, though the first entry predates it. It was a slim, spiral-bound notebook with a black cover, and I tucked it behind...

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The Cartographer’s Final Survey

The last thing I expected to find in my late uncle’s cabin was a stack of hand-drawn maps, but there they were, tucked behind a loose plank in the floor....

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The Weight of the Blue Door

I had grown accustomed to the strange little domestic disturbances in Aunt June’s house—the way the kitchen faucet would drip in a rhythm that felt deliberate, the occasional flicker of...

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The Painted Silence of Cray’s Hollow

For eight years, I had posed for artists in studios, classrooms, and galleries, always surrounded by the comforting cacophony of scraping charcoal and murmuring students. But when my neighbor, Elsie...

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The Wrong Hue

I’d always been a light sleeper, but that night, the shift in the air was enough to pull me from a dreamless void. My room was bathed in the familiar...

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The Salt on the Steps

My husband, Marcus, and I had been married for only six months when we packed our few belongings into a rented van and drove to the edge of the Cascade...

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The Drowned Regiment’s Lullaby

The rain came down in sheets over the Hessian Valley, a name that had stuck long after the Revolutionary War soldiers it honored had turned to dust. The town of...

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The Conductor’s Cadence

It began with a portrait. Not a photograph, but a pencil sketch my grandmother had drawn of me as a child, sitting on the piano stool in her old farmhouse,...

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The Hollow Oak Dispatch

In the autumn of 2016, I worked for a small appliance and furniture outlet in the foothills of the Appalachians, just shy of the Tennessee border. My name is Marcus,...

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The Cartographer’s Floor

During the summer of 2017, I was a graduate student in anthropology, and to pay for my tuition, I took a job digitizing old maps at a municipal archive in...

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The Mud and the Mirror

My daughter, Mara, and I made a ritual of visiting Revolutionary War battlegrounds. This autumn, we drove to Saratoga, then to Cowpens, and finally to the Monmouth Courthouse site in...

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