Ghost stories from Virginia

The Bell Tower’s Second Toll

I had just moved into the basement unit of an old Victorian house that had been converted into apartments. It was spacious, affordable, and had a certain charm I couldn’t...

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The Blanket’s Edge

I’ve lived in the old Harbinger House for eleven years, and in all that time, I’ve grown accustomed to the murmurs that greet me at the threshold of sleep. They’re...

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The Unset Table

I’m a graduate student at Meridian University, and I’ve been dealing with chronic insomnia and a touch of paranoia since my first year. My therapist prescribed me a mild sedative...

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The Door That Wouldn’t Stay Shut

I never believed in the family curse, not really. My mother’s side had their ‘gypsy blood’ jokes, and my father’s family muttered about the malocchio, but I was a science...

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The Blue Static Library

The year I turned twelve, my father brought me to the salt flats of Bonneville, a place where the horizon dissolved into a white shimmer and the sky felt like...

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The Frost That Follows

I’ve always prided myself on being the sort of person who needs proof. Ghosts, spirits, the afterlife—those were concepts for the gullible, the ones who watched too many reality shows....

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The Blanket of Static

I remember the cold seep of the linoleum under my bare feet as I shuffled to the kitchen at 3:17 a.m., the alarm clock’s red digits burned into my drowsy...

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The Broken Seal

The Portland branch of Meridian Analytics had occupied the same converted warehouse on the edge of the industrial district for nearly a decade and a half. We’d grown accustomed to...

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The Unwound Melody

It started with the music box, a fragile thing of painted porcelain and chipped gold trim, a relic from my grandmother’s own infancy. It sat on the dresser in my...

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The Hollow Creek Window

It was the summer I turned eight, and my family had just moved to the small town of Ashburn, tucked between a pine forest and a slow, muddy river. Our...

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The Hollow Vermilion

I used to live in a rented apartment above a defunct funeral parlor in the burned-out district of Cinder Falls, a town the interstate forgot. We left three winters ago,...

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The Locked Door

My name is Ellen, and for most of my life, I’ve been a skeptic. But a few things have happened that I can’t explain. When my kids were toddlers, I’d...

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The Sunken Ledger

My grandmother’s land had always been a patchwork of secrets, but the marshy lowland near the old mill pond was the one place she’d refused to discuss. When she passed,...

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The Lantern’s Toll

The porch light of the old farmhouse flickered once, then steadied, casting a sickly yellow glow across the warped boards where Elias sat, his wine glass sweating in the humid...

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The Halcyon House

I was sixteen that summer, and my family had rented a condo at the Halcyon Pines Resort, a sprawling complex of pastel stucco buildings, shimmering pools, and manicured lawns that...

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The Porcelain Visitor

In the summer of my fourth year, my family moved into my grandmother’s old farmhouse, a sprawling, creaking structure that had stood for over a century. My parents were young...

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The Pale Drift

I was eight, and our house sat on the edge of a town that forgot to update its streetlights. The windows rattled when the wind picked up, and the floorboards...

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The Rivets in the Dark

I was a machinist’s mate on the USS Triton’s Fury, a relic from the Cold War, decommissioned in 2009. When they gave us the choice to transfer or get out,...

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The Twelfth Candle

The snow fell in thick, unhurried flakes, muting the world beyond our cul-de-sac in upstate New York. Our house, a sprawling Victorian with peeling paint and a wraparound porch, was...

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The Unplugged Chime

It had been years since I last logged into the old forum, and I was eager to reconnect with my fellow enthusiasts. Life had taken me away from my usual...

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The Lantern in the Fern

The trouble began not with a sound or a sight, but with a sensation that crawled under my skin like a slow-spreading frost. It started in the autumn of 2021,...

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The Unfolding

In a quiet coastal town in Oregon, I moved into a modest bungalow that had been in my family for generations but sat empty for years. The house was a...

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The Hollow in the Hall

In the autumn of 1998, I was a night-shift archivist at the old Meridian County Records building, a place of dusty files and forgotten lives. My wife, Elena, and I...

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The Cat’s Eye Marble

My mother, Lena, has always had a gift for speaking with the dead, a talent she inherited from her grandmother. She never spoke of it openly, but I, being a...

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