ghosts - Stories

It’s Halloween, and Leo has convinced Noah to go to a party dressed as pirates. After a night of dancing and drinking with friends, their cozy stroll on the beach turns downright spooky when a ghost ship comes ashore, seemingly empty. While Noah is perfectly happy to ignore it and go home, Leo is not about to miss out on a chance to explore a pirate vessel, and Noah can’t let him go alone, can he?

(This is a short two-chapter Halloween story featuring Noah and Leo from Seaside Entries. Reading Seaside Entries first is recommended but not necessary to understand this story.)

Hoping to escape a painful breakup, Ryan Mitchell rents a secluded cabin in Vermont for Halloween. The place is perfect, except for three peculiar house rules, including one warning him never to open the door after three knocks at midnight.

But when a handsome stranger named Caleb appears on his doorstep during a storm, Ryan breaks the rule.

As an unexpected attraction grows between them, strange events begin to unfold, and Ryan soon discovers that the cabin—and Caleb—are hiding secrets far more terrifying than he ever imagined.

Ruth comes to James’ Park searching for a place to begin again. The old house seems ordinary at first. Some houses hold memories. Others set them free.

Levi Thissen is currently an entry-level reporter for the Baltimore Sun, but he went to college with the goal of becoming an investigative reporter. He decides his best chance of doing that is to make a pitch to the Managing Editor of the Sun. She accepts his proposal and assigns him to solve a 47-year-old murder mystery of a gay college student from a local campus, and he accepts the challenge. This is either going to work out in his favor, or he'll be permanently labeled as someone only fit to write for the National Enquirer.

Jason lives in the house he and Eric bought, talks to the dog, and tells his counselor the dreams. He doesn't tell about the cabinets that stand open on their own, or the whispers, or the footsteps that favor the left foot, the way Eric’s did. Pushed to the brink, Jason returns to the mountain where they once foraged for the Ghost of October, the mushroom that appears only when it chooses.

A note on this story: it is written in the dense, melancholy register of 19th-century Gothic fiction, and does not shy from grief, loneliness, or loss along its way to its ending.

For a hundred and fifty years, Jack has walked a county that has forgotten him, a farm boy who bartered his soul at a crossroads and paid twice over for it. Refused by Heaven, unclaimed by Hell, he has only a stolen coal to light his way, and windows he can watch but never touch.

Then he finds Julian's: nineteen, ill, certain no one would notice if he stopped waking. As October nears Halloween, the veil thins, and an old bargain comes due.

John, Hutch, and Putter are the kind of frat bros who use a girl in the middle so they don’t have to name what they’re doing together.

On Halloween there's no girl, but there is a campus legend every freshman has already dared: the grave of Midnight Malcolm, the sodomite witch hanged in 1693.

Call him three times and he comes back to claim what’s his.

On the edge of adulthood, Noah Jacobs carries the weight of two absences— a father who died before he took his first breath, and a mother who chose to leave. With high school behind him, he intends to spend the summer alone in the quiet refuge of his father’s old room. But life has other plans, and an unexpected arrival soon alters the course of his grief, his future, and his heart.

A musically based story where a young guitar player takes over for a deceased member of a popular group and is guided by his ghost.