Ghost stories from Wisconsin

The Lantern Man’s Farewell

At sixteen, Mara had only one memory of her great-uncle Elias that wasn’t laced with dread. It was the summer before he died, when she was nine. He’d come to...

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The Fourth Tenant’s Vigil

My family had never been one for talk of the supernatural. Dad would scoff at ghost stories, and Mom would shrug them off as folklore. They never said ‘there are...

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The Clockmaker’s Debt

The first time I saw the old man, he was standing at the end of my driveway, holding a broken pocket watch. It was a Tuesday, three weeks after we...

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The Coal Bin’s Tenant

My wife, Elena, our two daughters, and I had settled into my in-laws’ old farmhouse just outside the small town of Morrow’s Hollow. It was a rambling, drafty place built...

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The Lantern Keeper

The coastal town of Saltmarsh was known for two things: the stubborn smell of brine that clung to everything, and the lighthouse that had stood sentinel for over a century....

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The Cerulean Visitor

In the summer of my twenty-third year, I found myself back in the drafty Victorian my grandmother had left to my parents, perched on a hill overlooking the town of...

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The Static in the Walls

I never told anyone about the hum. It started the week we moved into the old farmhouse, a low vibration that seemed to seep through the plaster and into my...

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The Linen Closet

I’ve always been drawn to the eerie, the unexplained. Growing up in a small Nebraska town, I devoured books about hauntings and listened to ghost stories with a thrill that...

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The Cinnabar Clock

The day we first saw the house, the sky was the color of old pewter, and the rain fell in sheets that blurred the lines between earth and heaven. It...

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The Ductwork Barker

It was mid-October, and the old Victorian on Maple Street had just gotten a new furnace. My family had lived there for three years, and we’d heard our share of...

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The Dim Figure at the Linen Closet

It was the tail end of July, and my father’s house in rural Nebraska seemed to sweat from every pore. The air was thick with the smell of dust and...

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The Static Cat

My mornings are usually the same: coffee, a quick scroll through the news, and then the grind. But this Tuesday, my laptop screen started shivering. Not the normal flicker of...

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The Rosewood Locket

When I was twelve, I found a faded photograph tucked inside my mother’s Bible. The photo showed a young woman with auburn hair, her face soft with an old-fashioned smile,...

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The Key in the Cold Hall

It was past midnight when our rental car groaned into the gravel lot of the Silverpine Lodge, a rambling Victorian relic perched on a lonely stretch of coast. My mother,...

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The Silent Frequency

The first time I heard it, I thought it was the old pipes in the apartment. A faint, high-pitched whine that seemed to come from inside the walls, or maybe...

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The Sixth Step

The old farmhouse had a way of holding its breath. Every night, as the wind died and the cicadas ceased their rasping, I’d lie in bed and listen to the...

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The Cobalt Sigil

Elliot Marsh had always prided himself on being a creature of habit. His life was a carefully ordered sequence of events: alarm at six, coffee, commute, monotonous hours at the...

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The Table’s Guests

Growing up in my grandparents’ old farmhouse, I spent many nights on the lumpy pull-out couch in the parlor whenever a fever gripped me. The house was a maze of...

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The Gutted Lantern

I’d been in Copper Falls for three years, ever since my uncle died and left me his old house. The town had maybe ninety souls on a good census year,...

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The Unfurling

The clock on my nightstand glowed 3:47 AM when the sound came. It wasn’t a creak or a whisper or the wind. It was a wet, tearing noise, like something...

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The Key to the Root Cellar

I grew up in a house that seemed to breathe with its own rhythm, but it wasn’t until the autumn I turned thirteen that I realized the rhythm had a...

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The Ledger of Unraveling

I never thought much of the fifth-floor walkup on Meridian Street, with its peeling wallpaper and the perpetual smell of boiled cabbage from Mrs. Kowalski downstairs. But my rent was...

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The Drywall and the Broken Light

The house on Meridian Lane had a smell my stepfather called ‘old money’ and my sister called ‘dead flowers.’ I called it a warning, though I didn’t know it then....

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The Rope in the Pines

It began not with a whisper or a chill, but with the weight of the pines pressing in on the cul-de-sac of rusted trailers. I had moved to the Silver...

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