Ghost stories from Washington

The Ceiling’s Blessing

Ellen had always felt a strange connection to the unseen, but she never gave it much thought until the summer of 2014, when they moved into the old farmhouse on...

Read Story →

The Clockwork of Stains

The first time I noticed it, I assumed it was a draft. Martin and I had just moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the Kilgore Marsh, a...

Read Story →

The Fence Runners

In the autumn of 2015, our family settled into a rented house on the edge of a small town in Ohio, not far from an old railway line and a...

Read Story →

The Cardboard Circuit

Iris lived in a cramped apartment above a 24-hour laundromat in Des Moines, the groan of industrial dryers her constant lullaby. She believed in the paranormal with the fervor of...

Read Story →

The Hanger’s Flight

It was a little past midnight when I decided to get a glass of water. The house was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator and the occasional creak...

Read Story →

The Hollow Wall and the Unlatched Door

I’ve spent my whole life in the same corner of the state, a patch of scrubby land that’s been in my family for generations. At fifty-three, I still smell the...

Read Story →

The Seven-Stroke Knock

When I was twenty-two, I inherited my great-aunt Marta’s farmhouse in the high desert of New Mexico. The house was adobe, low and sprawling, with vigas that sagged like tired...

Read Story →

The Door That Learned to Wait

I never believed in the supernatural. I was a technician, a man of circuits and logic, and my world was a grid of cause and effect. So when the apartment...

Read Story →

The Hinge Protest

I’ve always had these little tremors of wrongness—a sudden chill in a sunny room, a wave of nausea before a phone call. Doctors called it anxiety; I called it noise....

Read Story →

The Drawer’s Hunger

I’ve always been a light sleeper, but the kind of light that snaps awake at the slightest creak, ready to flee or fight. The episodes, as I called them, were...

Read Story →

The Hollow Man in the Fern

My name is Marta Reyes, and I’m a senior in high school now. I’ve never told anyone the full story, not even my therapists, because they’d lock me away for...

Read Story →

The Laughing Linoleum

The first time I noticed the pattern, I was scrubbing a stubborn stain from the kitchen floor. It was a Tuesday, the week after we moved into the old farmhouse...

Read Story →

The Seam of the Hollow Earth

The summer we moved to Carbon Hill, I was twelve and believed in nothing except the certainties of dirt and rust. Our house was a tired Victorian slumped at the...

Read Story →

The Grinning Door

We moved into the top half of a converted warehouse in the industrial district of a city that never truly slept. The building was a relic of the 1920s, its...

Read Story →

The Rag Doll in the Attic

Eight years ago, when our daughter Mira was just a baby, we lived in a cramped attic apartment in the old mill town of Bramblewick. The building was a converted...

Read Story →

The Last Lantern

It was the final night of summer before we all scattered to different high schools, and I’d convinced my parents to let me host a bonfire at the old Miller...

Read Story →

The Cradle in the Corner

When I was seven, my grandmother, Elara, fell into a fog that thickened with each passing week. The doctors used words like ‘vascular dementia’ and ‘cerebral atrophy,’ but to me,...

Read Story →

The Glass-Water Apparition

It was the last Tuesday of March in the town of Millbrook, a place known for its old textile mills and the river that ran through them. I was twenty-two,...

Read Story →

The Ultraviolet Guest

My earliest memory of the house on Balsam Fir Lane is the smell of ozone and burnt dust. That was the year I turned nine, and my mother, a night-shift...

Read Story →

The Lace Hem of Persistence

My father was a handyman, and during the summer I turned fourteen, I often tagged along on his jobs to hand him tools and earn pocket money. One June, we...

Read Story →

The Hollow Harvest

My old friend Marcus and I grew up in the small town of Stillwater, a place where everyone knew everyone’s business and the cornfields seemed to swallow secrets whole. Marcus...

Read Story →

The Loop of Static

The weekend had a strange hush to it, as if the city itself had taken a breath and forgotten to let it out. Maya and I usually rolled with a...

Read Story →

The Pale Visitor

I never believed in ghosts until I moved into my in-laws’ farmhouse last autumn. The place had been in their family for over a century, and it sat on a...

Read Story →

The Blue Weight of Morning

In the rust-belt town of Ashfall, where the river ran thick with chemical rainbows and the old mills stood like hollow teeth, Marisol rented the top floor of a house...

Read Story →