Ghost Stories
The dead who will not stay put. Some of these ghosts want something, some only repeat what they did in life, and a few seem not to know they are dead at all. The oldest form of horror story, and still the one most likely to keep you from turning off the hall light.
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The Unmarked Stop
Ruth Halvorsen has played the organ at Trinity Lutheran for forty-eight years, mostly for funerals. When the restorer took the console apart, he found one drawknob that had been panelled over in 1958. It has no name engraved on it, and it doesn't make a sound. Not from the organ, anyway.
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Man-Size in Marble Classic
A young artist and his wife rent a cottage near a village church where, the housekeeper warns, the marble knights do not stay on their tombs on All Saints' Eve.
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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Classic
In a drowsy Dutch valley along the Hudson, a lanky schoolmaster courts a rich farmer's daughter and fears the ghost of a headless Hessian trooper.
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Walking Night
On the island where I married, there is one night at the end of October when every house sets its shoes out on the step, a pair for everyone inside and one pair more. In the morning the extra pair is gone, and that is a good year.
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“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” Classic
A sceptical young professor on a seaside golfing holiday finds an old bronze whistle in the ruins of a Templar church and decides to blow it.
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Self-Guided Tour
Welcome to the Ashcombe House, a historic home museum preserved exactly as the family left it in 1891. Please collect a headset from the front desk. Enter the number posted in each room to hear about it.
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Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter Classic
The young apprentice of a Dutch master loves his teacher's niece, until a wealthy and strangely rigid suitor arrives to claim her.
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Siskiyou Summit
Every trucker who runs I-5 at night knows the rule for the man walking in the left lane near the Oregon line. Flash twice, move over, don't stop. My husband stopped.
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July Ice
On the night of July 11th the reservoir above our town in Montana froze solid, in the middle of a heat wave. Half the town walked out onto it. Under the ice, the lights of the old town were on.
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The Moonlit Road Classic
A wealthy young man, his grieving father and a medium each give their account of one terrible night and one moonlit walk home.
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Please Stay on the Line
After my father died, I spent a week in his house closing his accounts. The last one was the landline he'd had since 1974. The phone company's automated system said it could only cancel service with the account holder.
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The Haunted Dolls' House Classic
A collector snaps up a magnificent antique dolls' house, and that night watches a tragedy play out among its tiny rooms.
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Afterward Classic
An American couple buy an old house in Dorset, and they are told that it has a ghost, though you never know it's a ghost until long afterward.
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Home Inspection Report, 18 Tamarack Lane
A pre-purchase home inspection report for a 1962 Cape in coastal Maine, shared by the buyer who commissioned it. The roof needs work. The water heater is near the end of its life. The basement stairs have fourteen steps going down and thirteen coming up.
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Stay Until I Fall Asleep
On the night shift at a small county hospital, the call light in Room 4 comes on most nights around two. There is an old woman in the bed who only wants someone to sit with her. There is one rule about it.
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The Open Door Classic
A colonel's son falls dangerously ill after hearing a voice crying in the ruins beside their rented Scottish house.
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Amour Dure Classic
A young Polish historian in a sleepy Italian town becomes infatuated with a Renaissance duchess whose lovers all met violent ends.
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The Wind in the Rose-Bush Classic
A schoolteacher arrives in a small New England town to take in her orphaned niece, but her stepmother-in-law seems strangely reluctant to call the girl down.
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Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched Classic
Harriott Leigh's life is shaped by a secret love affair, and her death is only the beginning of the story.
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Route Fourteen
In 1988 I delivered the morning paper in Aberdeen, Washington. One house on my route had been empty for years, but it had a subscription going back to 1931, and every Friday there was an envelope of coins on the porch rail to pay for it.
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The Signal-Man Classic
A traveller climbs down to a lonely railway cutting to talk with the signalman, who has been receiving warnings from a figure by the tunnel mouth.
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The Train Horn at 4:44
A thread from a small town's community forum. A few residents have started hearing a freight train's horn at 4:44 every morning. The town's rail line was torn up in 1979.
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Lost Hearts Classic
An orphaned boy is taken in by his elderly cousin, a reclusive scholar with an unusually keen interest in the boy's coming birthday.
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Gate B0
Stranded overnight in an airport after a cancellation, I heard the boarding call at 3 a.m. for a flight to my hometown that my father took in 1999. It was boarding at Gate B0. The B gates start at 1.
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[inaudible]
I transcribe focus-group recordings for a market research firm. The rule is verbatim: you type everything you can hear. In the files from one facility, there's someone talking under the room tone.
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The Story of Mimi-Nashi-Hōïchi Classic
A blind young musician at a seaside temple is summoned each night to perform the epic of a great sea battle for a mysterious noble audience.
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The Upper Berth Classic
A seasoned traveller tells how he was assigned stateroom 105 on a transatlantic liner, a cabin whose previous passengers all went overboard.
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Lost & Found
Selected listings from the Lost & Found column of a small-town weekly paper, collected by a reader who spent a summer going through its back issues on microfilm. Most of it is dogs and car keys.
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A Haunted Island Classic
Left alone for the end of the summer in a cottage on a remote Canadian island, a student starts to feel he is not the last guest after all.
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The Bowmen Classic
Outnumbered and facing annihilation on the Western Front, a British soldier murmurs an old Latin motto, and the battlefield changes.
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Kerfol Classic
A man viewing an abandoned manor house in Brittany is greeted by a silent pack of dogs that do not bark or follow him.
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RE: Updated Seating Chart (4th Floor)
An email thread forwarded to us by a reader who used to work in claims processing. It begins with the most boring message ever sent in an office, and a desk nobody can account for.
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Yuki-Onna Classic
Two woodcutters caught in a blizzard shelter in a ferryman's hut, and only one of them survives the visit of a woman dressed in white.
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Green Tea Classic
A gentle clergyman confides to a doctor that, for years, he has been followed by a small and patient companion that no one else can see.
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The Seven-Ten
When I was a girl in Cale, Nebraska, a pale blue sedan drove down Orchard Road every summer evening at ten past seven, full of waving people. We all waved back. Within the month, whoever had been in it moved away.
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The Striding Place Classic
A guest at a Yorkshire shooting party goes searching the moors for his missing friend near a narrow and treacherous stretch of river.
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The Toll-House Classic
Four young men accept a dare to spend a night in an abandoned toll-house where no tenant has survived a night.
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Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book Classic
An English scholar in a remote French cathedral town is offered an antique scrapbook at a suspiciously low price.
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The Empty House Classic
A man and his formidable aunt spend a night in a house where a terrible crime once happened, armed with a candle and their nerves.
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Buddy Check
The summer I was nineteen I lifeguarded at a lake camp in the pines. Every twenty minutes I blew the whistle and the kids raised their hands in pairs. That was the summer the count stopped coming out even.
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The Open Window Classic
A nervous man arrives at a country house for a rest cure and is entertained by the hostess's very composed fifteen-year-old niece.
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The Red Room Classic
A confident young man insists on spending the night in a castle's notorious red room, despite the warnings of its three ancient custodians.
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Mr. Justice Harbottle Classic
A notoriously cruel hanging judge receives a letter warning him of a trial in which he himself will be the accused.
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The Four-Fifteen Express Classic
A traveller on a country train shares a compartment with an old acquaintance, a man who, he later learns, had been missing for months.
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The Apparition Classic
An elderly marquis tells how, as a young man, a friend's request to fetch some papers from a shuttered château led to an encounter he never explained.
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For the Blood Is the Life Classic
On the roof of an old tower in Calabria, a host points out a mound of earth in the moonlight and tells the story of the girl buried there.
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The Tractate Middoth Classic
A young library assistant fetches an obscure Hebrew book for a visitor and meets someone among the stacks who should not be there.
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Wandering Willie's Tale Classic
A blind fiddler tells how his grandfather, wrongly accused of not paying his rent, went to the other world to get a receipt from his dead landlord.
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How Love Came to Professor Guildea Classic
A cold, rational scientist who despises sentiment finds himself the object of an invisible creature's devotion.
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The Bus-Conductor Classic
A level-headed man explains why, after a night in a country house, he will never board a particular kind of horse-drawn hearse.
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The Jolly Corner Classic
Returning to New York after thirty-three years abroad, a man begins stalking the empty rooms of his childhood home at night, hunting the man he might have been.
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Overflow Lot
The outlet mall off the interstate puts holiday shoppers in an overflow lot across the frontage road. I parked in Row K. When I came back out in the fog, the rows went past Z.
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The Listener Classic
A struggling writer finds unusually cheap rooms in London, then begins to sense that someone is always on the other side of the wall.
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The Eyes Classic
After dinner, an old bachelor tells his young guests about the eyes that appeared at the foot of his bed on two separate occasions.
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Madam Crowl's Ghost Classic
An old woman recalls the winter she was a thirteen-year-old servant girl at Applewale House, where an ancient mistress lay dying upstairs.
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The Shadows on the Wall Classic
After a brother's death, three sisters notice a shadow on the study wall that no object in the room could possibly cast.
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The Trial for Murder Classic
A London gentleman summoned for jury service recognises the accused man in the dock, and so does someone else in the courtroom.
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Count Magnus Classic
A travel writer researching an old Swedish family grows unwisely curious about the mausoleum of its most notorious ancestor.
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The Familiar Classic
A retired sea captain in Dublin begins to receive anonymous warnings, and then to glimpse a small, silent man who keeps his distance.
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Jerry Bundler Classic
On a night just before Christmas, commercial travellers at an old inn swap ghost stories, and one of them decides to stage a prank.
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John Charrington's Wedding Classic
John Charrington swears to the girl he loves that he will come to their wedding, dead or alive.
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The Gateway of the Monster Classic
The occult investigator Carnacki spends a night in a manor-house room where a door slams itself shut and the bedclothes are flung into corners.
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The Death of Halpin Frayser Classic
A man lost in the Napa hills falls asleep under the trees and dreams of a forest of blood, and of a figure coming toward him.
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Three at Table Classic
Over drinks at an inn, a seaman tells of the one uncanny night of his life, at a lonely house in the marshes.
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Telling the Bees
My grandmother kept bees in the Willamette Valley and taught me the old rule: when someone in the family dies, you have to go and tell them. She also taught me what the bees do if nobody tells them.
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Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street Classic
Two medical students take cheap lodgings in an old Dublin house once owned by a notorious judge, and begin to dream badly.
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Estate Inventory, Lots 1–64
An estate liquidator's working inventory for a farmhouse in Vermont, sent to us by the heir. Everything in the house came in pairs, one for the man who lived there and one for someone else. Lot 64 is not for sale.
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The Victim Classic
A jealous chauffeur nurses a grudge against his kindly employer, who has broken up his engagement.
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Secret Worship Classic
A silk merchant on a business trip makes a sentimental detour to the remote mountain school where he was educated as a boy.
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The Rose Garden Classic
A bossy country wife decides to clear an old arbour and post in her garden to make room for roses, despite everyone's unease.