Ghost stories from Wisconsin

The Hollow Door

The cabin sat at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by a forest that seemed to hold its breath after sunset. I had invited three friends for a weekend...

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The Empty Frame

I never believed in the supernatural, not in the way people mean it. I figured if ghosts were real, they’d have better things to do than rattle chains. But there...

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The Pipe Organ in the Cellar

Three years ago, when I was twelve, my two best friends, Sam and Leo, and I thought we were fearless. Our new challenge was the cellar, a damp, concrete pit...

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The Stairwell’s Gift

Marlowe had never feared the dark. It was the half-light that unsettled him—the treacherous gray of dusk, the fuzzy edges of dawn. But his wife, Elara, had always joked that...

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The Carbon Paper

The building I manage is a squat, beige concrete block that squats beside the interstate as it bends away from town. Once, this was the edge of a respectable neighborhood,...

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The Cartographer’s Loom

My grandmother, Elara, was a cartographer, but not the kind who drew maps of the world as it is. She drew maps of the world as it could be, with...

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The Couch That Ate the Night

It was the summer of 1988, and I was eleven, living with my mother and her boyfriend in a cramped apartment on the fourteenth floor of the Meridian Towers. My...

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The Basement Murals

The old Hargrave house sat at the end of Maple Lane, a sprawling Victorian that had witnessed the rise and fall of a timber empire. My grandfather, Elias Thorne, bought...

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The Tally Man

Growing up, I’d only ever had two brushes with the unexplainable, and the first one was something my family referred to as ‘the tally man.’ Not a ghost, not a...

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The Antlered Hour

The afternoon had the false sweetness of a Sunday in late October, the sun a pale coin behind a gauze of clouds, the air carrying the smell of apples and...

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The Tenant of Room 3B

In the fall of 2014, I moved into the top floor of an old, converted schoolhouse on the outskirts of Millbrook. The bottom floor was a dusty antique shop that...

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The Polished Room

It was the last building on our Friday rotation, a squat, beige edifice on the edge of the industrial park, home to a logistics firm that had been our client...

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The Bone Harvest

Mai had always been wary of the dreams. In her family, dreams were not mere nighttime fancies but messages from the unseen world, omens to be heeded. Her mother, a...

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The Far End of the Table

At twelve, I learned that our new house on Cedar Lane had a habit of showing you things you didn’t want to see. We moved there in the dead of...

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The Waking Hour

In the late summer of 2011, I was house-sitting for my aunt in the remote town of Derry, Maine. The house was an old Victorian relic, creaking with every breath...

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The Mirror in Room 7

My family checked into the old Hartwell Hotel, a sprawling, Victorian-era building with creaking floors and a smell of mothballs and dust. I was eight, sharing a room with my...

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The Rain Collector’s Hour

It’s strange how a single night can rewrite everything you thought you knew about your own town. For me, that night came in late October, when the rain had been...

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The Pale Visitor at Lake Halcyon

It had been three weeks since the incident with the bull moose, and I had finally started sleeping without the nightlight. The memory of that massive, dark shape charging out...

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The Weight of a Feather

The summer after my junior year, I spent most afternoons at my grandmother’s farmhouse in the Catskills. It was a place I’d known since childhood, but that year it felt...

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The Hanging Garden of Roots

The summer I turned seventeen, my mother finally convinced me to take over my sister’s old room at the end of the hall. It was larger than mine, with a...

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The Hand Under the Floorboards

In the village of Khao Yai, nestled among emerald rice paddies and mist-wreathed mountains, we held fast to the old ways. Spirits, both benevolent and vengeful, were as real to...

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The Fabric of Silence

In the high desert of New Mexico, where the earth is cracked like old leather and the sky is a vast, indifferent eye, I, Elena, a midwife and herbalist, had...

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The Lonely Easel of Pine Hollow

In the summer of 2001, my older brother’s friend, Danny, had an encounter that still haunts him. Danny lived in the small town of Pine Hollow, nestled in the foothills...

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The Kitchen Timer

The first time I saw the timer, I was seven years old, sitting on the linoleum floor of my grandmother’s farmhouse kitchen. The house was ancient, creaking with the weight...

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