Ghost stories from Washington

The Lariat’s Knot

The old hay barn sat at the edge of the property like a sleeping brontosaurus, its ribs showing through in the form of weathered, gray boards. My stepfather’s family had...

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The Propeller’s Lullaby

The autumn of my twenty-fourth year found me bunkering in my mother’s new house—a sagging Victorian on the edge of a dying mill town. Rent was free, but the air...

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The Thing Under the Stairs

When I was six, my mother and I would drive three hours every other weekend to visit my Aunt Ruth in the dusty town of Greyhollow. Her house was a...

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The Lantern Man at the Edge of the Orchard

Before I tell you what happened that October night, you should understand that I’m fifteen, and I have two older brothers, and we live on a failing apple orchard. Dad...

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The Fridge’s Chorus

I was 31, a physics student, and I had spent my entire adult life believing in nothing but the cold, hard mathematics of the universe. My apartment in the industrial...

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The Lantern Tree

I remember the house as a hulking silhouette against the Oregon mist, its gables like crooked fingers. We’d moved from a cramped apartment in Portland to this relic of a...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

Lena Mire had not thought about the figure in the woods for nearly two decades. As a child, she had called it the Tall One, a lanky silhouette with a...

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The Porcelain Task

I’ve always been a skeptic, but my dreams have a way of blurring the line between sleep and waking. Last autumn, I moved to a small coastal town named Dredge...

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The Weight of Absence

I was twenty-three when I moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the Salton Sea, a place that felt more like a forgotten memory than a home. The...

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The Crouching Man in the Study

I must have been five, maybe six, the summer we moved to that house on Bramblewood Lane. It was a sprawling Victorian with a wraparound porch and a tower that...

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The Cackling Pumpkin

My name is Willow, and I’ve always felt the presence of the unseen. It’s not a sixth sense or a curse; it’s just a fact of life, like the color...

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The Mirror in Ward 4

I never used to believe in ghosts. I thought they were just stories people told to scare themselves on cold nights. That was before the accident that left me with...

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The Leaden Choir

Elias Thorne, 67, lived in the clattering compression of a city that never slept, but his small apartment in the Farrow Building had become a tomb of ticking silence. The...

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The Attic of Unfinished Things

In the winter of my ninth year, I lived with my grandmother in a crooked farmhouse that leaned into the wind like a weary traveler. My bedroom was at the...

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The Blueprint of the Missing Wing

The Blueprint of the Missing Wing My earliest memory is of the house at 14 Ashwood Lane, a sprawling Victorian with a turret that never seemed to sit straight. We...

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The Metal Ceiling’s Gait

I’d always considered myself a rational man, even after years of renting drafty farmhouses and forgotten lodges across the Midwest. So when I signed the lease for the old converted...

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The Floor in the Furnace Room

I’m 24 now, and I’ve had my share of odd happenings, but the one that sticks with me most happened when I was 14. We lived in a rambling Victorian...

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The Ledger of Unfinished Work

My name is Elias Thorne, and I have always been a student of the macabre, not out of a desire for thrills, but from a quiet, academic obsession with the...

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The Cold Spigot

My mother and I moved to a little town called Stillwater, right off the coast, where the fog rolled in thick each night and the houses seemed to lean against...

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The Static Column

It was December 14th, just after sunset, when my partner Maya and I settled onto the worn corduroy couch in our rental farmhouse. The house, old and drafty, creaked with...

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The Counterpane

I’d been staying with my boyfriend, Marcus, in his one-bedroom apartment in the old part of Duluth, Minnesota, ever since my own lease fell through. It wasn’t ideal, but it...

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The Hand in the Loft

I was lying awake in my grandmother’s attic, the narrow bed pushed against the sloping ceiling. The house had been in our family for decades, but the attic had always...

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The Chattering Mannequin

Ever since the old Kessler’s Department Store shut down in the ’80s, the basement had been a dumping ground for oddities. When the town’s historical society decided to turn it...

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The Iron Oak

The old farmhouse at the end of Cedar Lane had always been a subject of local curiosity. From a distance, it was picture-perfect: white clapboard, green shutters, a wraparound porch...

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