Ghost stories from Washington

The Unwound Music Box

The old Blackwood estate stood silhouetted against a bruised twilight sky, its skeletal gables like crooked fingers reaching for something long lost. Years had passed since the last Blackwood had...

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The Old Forts Unseen Guests

When I was eleven, my family visited my uncle who lived in a small town near the mountains. One afternoon, we decided to explore an old military outpost perched on...

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The Black Spot Bloom

The salt spray stung Elara’s cheeks as the ferry chugged towards Black Rock Island. Her Uncle Silas, a man whose face seemed permanently etched with the grim lines of old...

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The Hollow Morning

Mara first felt the weight at thirteen, a familiar oppression that settled on her chest like a tombstone. It was always the same: a half-waking haze, her ears filling with...

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The Static Well

Nina had always prided herself on her logical mind. A biochemist, she trusted in the empirical, the measurable. So when the episodes began, she approached them as a clinical puzzle....

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The Static Choir

The first time it happened, I blamed the old wiring in the rental cottage. A crackle in the wall, a flicker of the bedside lamp, and then that sound—a buzzing,...

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The Bone Cradle

The house on Meridian Lane had always been a place of quiet decay, its bones creaking like an old ship in a storm. I moved in with my mother and...

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The Parlor Game

The autumn of 2021 was unseasonably warm, and my partner, Lena, and I had decided to host our first Thanksgiving in the old convent we’d bought six months prior. The...

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The Mothman’s Lullaby

I’m Elara, and I’m sixteen. I know that sounds young to be telling you this, but I swear on my grandmother’s grave that every word is true. I’ve always felt...

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The Weight of the Visitor

I am a man of logic, or at least I used to be. My name is Adrian Cole, and for the past decade I have made a decent living crafting...

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The Faint Haze of Morning

I was four, maybe a whisper older, when the colors of the world seemed too bright and the silence of our new home too heavy. We had moved into a...

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The Persistent Draft

Even now, years later, I can’t shake the feeling that some places are stained with sorrow. When I first stepped into that apartment, a wave of melancholy hit me so...

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The Hallway’s Appetite

I never believed in ghosts, not really. My name is Mara, and I lived with my grandmother in a creaky old house on the edge of a town that time...

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The Painted Veil on the Windshield

My grandmother had a gift, or a curse, depending on how you looked at it. She saw the pale rider’s harbinger, a translucent figure that appeared to her before death...

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The Overlook Tenant

The first place was a ground-floor unit in a converted Victorian, all creaking floorboards and drafty windows. I called it the ‘Warm-Up House’ because nothing truly unsettling happened, just a...

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The Hollow Wardrobe

We called it the Ridge, a crumbling house perched atop a granite outcrop that jutted from the woods like a rotten tooth. To reach it, you had to navigate a...

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The Gardener’s Mirror

Three months after the incident with the television static, I found myself standing on the balcony of the old farmhouse my mother had inherited from her aunt. The yard stretched...

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The Candle That Wouldn’t Die

The first time I used the board, I thought I was playing a game. My cousin Lena had brought it over on a stormy October afternoon, just after my brother...

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What Was Walking?

This story comes from my dad, who told me this when I was 12, I was highly interested in anything paranormal and although this probably pales in comparison to other...

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The Honeycomb Hum

In the fall of 2019, I moved into a converted grain silo on the outskirts of a faded Kansas town. The silo had been gutted and renovated into a two-story...

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The Blue Hollow Grin

It was a Tuesday night in late November, three years after we’d traded the damp of Vancouver for the dry heat of Albuquerque. I was twelve, spending my evenings in...

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The River’s Ledger

In the summer of 1987, I bought two acres of wild land for three thousand dollars, carved from the edge of the Quinault Reservation in Mason County. The property was...

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The Basement of Porous Earth

Gulls cried overhead, their harsh calls muffled by the dense fog that often rolled in from the harbor. The town of Marrow Point clung to the edge of a rain-slicked...

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The Accordion Man’s Watch

There are nights when the world feels like a held breath, and the road I drive home is a dark ribbon through a forest that has forgotten its name. I...

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