Ghost stories from Washington

The Lace Curtain Divide

At nineteen, I thought I knew the texture of every creak in my aunt’s house. The Victorian had a personality—a damp, watchful one—but it was familiar, like a headache you...

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The Green-Eyed Watchers

In the autumn of 1962, my sister Clara and I were kids in a cramped duplex in Spokane. We slept on a threadbare cot in the dining room, our older...

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The Moth Collector

It started as a minuscule flicker at the edge of my vision, a pinprick of light that vanished before I could even register its color. I’d be lying in bed,...

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The Flickering Bar

On a humid night in late August, I woke suddenly, my skin prickling with the sensation of being watched. The digital clock on my nightstand read 2:47 AM. The bedroom...

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The Lavender Sink

I worked as a quality inspector at Meridian Plastics, a sprawling factory that churned out thousands of injection-molded parts daily. The facility had recently expanded with a new annex, a...

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The Salt Garden

It began with the salt. I had taken to walking the beach at dawn, when the tide was low and the sand was a slick mirror for the sky. It...

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The Static Clutch

Five years ago, I moved into Adrian’s house in the foothills of the Cascades, a mid-century relic with clapboard siding and a carport that sagged like a tired eyelid. The...

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The Nickel-Plated Vigil

The first weekend of April 2014, the multiplex was showing ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier,’ but in our house, we were living a different kind of war. I remember because...

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The Last Winter at the Pinecrest House

The call came on a Tuesday, the kind of flat, gray afternoon that made you forget the sun had ever existed. My ex-husband, Carl, had been living with us for...

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The Coin Slot’s Toll

The birthday had been a blur of neon, cheap pizza, and the clatter of pins. Lily, our friend who wore only shades of blue, had laughed hardest when Mark, the...

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The Cartographer’s Compass

The first time I saw the map, I was eight, sitting cross-legged on the dusty floor of my grandmother’s attic. She had called it a ‘life chart,’ a sprawling parchment...

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The Red Lantern at the Bend

I woke to the sound of a grinding engine and the crunch of gravel, something I rarely heard at 1:30 in the morning on our quiet stretch of country road....

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The Gilded Caress

When I was nine, we moved to a crumbling farmhouse at the edge of the Muddy Creek marsh, far from the town’s proper streets. Our nearest neighbor was a reclusive...

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The Spring Coil

The house had always been a bit off, even for a converted church. High ceilings that made every step echo, stained glass windows that threw colored shadows across the floor,...

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The Lantern’s Debt

The last ferry from the mainland docked at ten, but I missed it. I’d been at a pub in town, nursing a single pint of porter, fighting a headache that...

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The Charred Sermon

When I first met Elinor at a dusty antique shop in eastern Oregon, I was drawn to her quiet intensity. She had lost her youngest boy to a fever three...

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The Volume War

I was six when we moved into the old farmhouse on Thornapple Road. The place had been empty for years, and the previous owners had left behind a peculiar contraption...

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The Corner That Breathed

The house on Maple Street had always felt too quiet, especially at night. My mother, Clara, had accepted the creaks and groans as old bones settling, but the silence in...

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The Five-Fingered Touch

My buddy Marcus and I were having a sleepover at his place, a sprawling old farmhouse that sat at the edge of a cornfield. The field itself was the stuff...

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The Lantern at Low Tide

The first time I knew something was off, I was seven, standing at the edge of the murky canal behind our rented cottage. My mother had warned me about the...

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The Static Between Floorboards

I had not thought about the gift in years, not since the medications and the therapy and the strict routine of my nine-to-five life had smoothed the edges off my...

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The Film Roll

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. As a kid, I’d laugh at the creaky floorboards and the way the draft made the doors groan. My family moved into the...

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The Dark Mile

I grew up in the high desert of eastern Oregon, where the nearest town was a twenty-minute drive down a winding two-lane road that the county barely bothered to maintain....

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The Lantern Tree

I first heard about the place from my friend Mira, who had moved into the pool house on her ex-husband’s sprawling estate after a messy divorce. She was between apartments,...

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