Ghost stories from Washington

The Watcher At The Shower Window

This happened about three years ago to my boyfriend at the time, but it occurred at my house. He was taking a shower one afternoon, and as he was he...

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The Third Cup

It was a Tuesday morning, the kind of gray, damp February day when the house seemed to hold its breath. I was twenty-three, living alone in the old farmhouse my...

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The Static of Summer

The house on Cranberry Lane never felt like ours, even after nineteen years. My mother, a pragmatist who believed in logic and routine, saw it as a bargain; a fixer-upper...

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The Lacquered Rosewood Board

My grandmother’s house always smelled of dried lavender and old paper. I spent summers there, roaming the dusty attic where she kept her ‘curiosities,’ as she called them. She had...

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The Blue Door at Number 12

In the autumn of 1987, I moved into a crumbling Queen Anne on the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia, with four other recent grads: Marcus, a philosophy major with a morbid...

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The Dripping Sound Above the Nursery

In 1989, I shared a sprawling, decaying Victorian mansion in the outskirts of Providence, Rhode Island, with four other graduate students. The house, built in the 1880s by a wealthy...

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The Shadow in the Old House

In the late autumn of 1992, I shared a large apartment in a northern city with three friends. We had signed the lease for the spacious, creaky place because the...

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The Guttering Lantern

The year was 1992. We were a motley crew of five, crammed into a decaying Queen Anne revival perched precariously on the bluffs overlooking the skeletal remains of Oakhaven, a...

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The Unseen Cradle

In the brittle autumn of 2021, my wife and I moved into a rambling Victorian house that had been converted into three apartments. Our unit was on the ground floor,...

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The Red Door Game

I was eight when I first saw the boy in the attic. My grandmother had passed, and my parents were clearing out her old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere....

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The Weight in the Wainscoting

My earliest memories of the house on Tallow Lane are not of cruelty, but of its peculiar geometry. It was a skeleton of a home, a former apple-packing shed converted...

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The Card on the Door

The rain was a constant, whispering presence as I made my way along the perimeter road of the old naval hospital at Bremerton. It was 0213, and the fog had...

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The Night They Answered

I was born in the sweltering heat of Arizona, but when I was six, my father’s job transferred us to the damp, evergreen-choked town of Ferndale, Washington. The move was...

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The Fallen Figurine

Ever since my two closest friends, Marcus and Lena, died within months of each other, I’ve been feeling things I can’t explain. Cold spots that linger like a held breath,...

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The Ledger of Unfinished Business

It began, as these things often do, with a single misplaced object. A receipt for a purchase we never made, tucked neatly into the pages of my mother’s favorite cookbook....

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The Window at Number 12

I spent my childhood on Maple Street, a cul-de-sac of identical brick houses with manicured lawns and the kind of neighbors who left their doors unlocked. Every family had kids,...

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The Hollow in the Attic

I was thirteen when we moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of Thornwood. The place had been empty for years, and the realtor warned us it needed work,...

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Spectral Television Experience

In 2006, my cousins and my aunt, Penny, were living at my grandmother’s house temporarily. Because the house is quite old and small, there were not enough bedrooms to accommodate...

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The Static in the Fuse Box

Marlowe had just finished her final exams at Northgate High, and the freedom of summer felt like a held breath finally released. Her best friend, Dex, had been talking about...

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The Weeping Cog

The room I use for writing is a cramped, windowless cell at the back of a renovated mill. The walls are exposed brick, and a single fluorescent tube hums overhead,...

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The Borrowed Room

In the autumn of 1995, my husband, Walter, and I had just moved into a sprawling Victorian house in the quiet town of Millbrook. The house was beautiful, with high...

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The Cartography of Lost Things

The Map Library at the University of New Carthage was a cathedral of silence. Dust motes danced in the shafts of afternoon light that slanted through the tall, arched windows,...

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The Amber Pane

Marta lived in a restored farmhouse on the edge of the county, where the fields rolled into a dense pine forest. Her husband, Leo, often worked late shifts, leaving her...

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