Tag: ghost story

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Prodigy by Sara Dobbie

The piano arrives in a flurry of men pushing, pulling, and shouting directions. They heave it onto a dolly and up the front steps. They guide it through the doorway, then carry and lift and shuffle all the furniture to position it as the focal point of the front room.

In the back room, Clara hides in a corner and eavesdrops. She listens to her mother say, “This is what Clara needs. A hobby. A purpose.” Her father agrees, “Yes, this might help.” Help with what, Clara scoffs. Help diminish her propensity toward solitude? Help transform her into a different girl? Nothing could help Clara fulfill her mother’s expectations.

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Lost in Transition by Leslie Wolfe

Francine usually avoided baggage claim, especially after an international flight arrived. The palpable, cranky energy that rolled off the living as they watched other people’s luggage bump down the ramp was enough to put her on edge for days. She ignored the red flags her brain flung out and held her ground, waiting. Again.

Hours passed. When even the security guards were dozing in their uncomfortable chairs, the baggage conveyor belt’s fogged plastic flaps parted to admit an abandoned duffel. An ethereal shape draped itself over it, quickly apparent as a diaphanous, boy-sized human that leaped off the carousel and ran to Francine. “You’re back!”

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Blatherwick Hall — New Luxury Apartments! by Rick White

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Mildred wants to borrow a button again, she pleads with Charlotte — says come on, we haven’t played in so very long. Agatha chides them — we’re packing them away children, soon we’ll all be gone. The men with clipboards stand outside, saying this roof is crooked, something’s wrong.

This button was a porthole once, it was a Catherine wheel. These shoelaces were conger-eels, this matchbox was a bomb.

Agatha remembers this house so full of little feet and little laughs. Summer evenings yawned like dozing cats; we listened to faeries singing at the bottom of the garden, eavesdropped on wood nymphs chattering beneath the slow-crackle of bonfire leaves.

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Haunted by Jayson Carcione

The boy calls me The Lady. Bed-ridden, surrounded by mountains of comic books and tissues of blood and snot, he looks  for me in the cracks in the wall, the grotesque stains on the ceiling, smudged window glass.  He should be looking outside where there is grey light upon the lake, where leaves turn yellow and red on the branches. He saw me once in the corner of a broken mirror in the old apartment in the city. He thought me very beautiful. I say this not out of vanity, but to note he saw me as the unblemished peasant girl I once was.

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Encaulled by Steven French

There was a place, it was said, where if you held still, stopped your breath, waited, waited … you could see the ghostly funeral processions pass. Down the long road from the old mansion house, now a nursing home. The family, long since gone, had had the privilege, when one of them died, of having the coffin carried down the long road at midnight. Down through the fields, now housing estates, across the streams and becks, now paved over, past the stores and warehouses, now coffee houses and apartment complexes. If anyone were about, doing god knows what, out with cause, or not, they would turn aside, or step back into the shadows, eyes down, letting the procession step slowly by. Down towards the river, down through the town to the parish church. There to pause, to request admittance, a soft glove against the door, the slow creak as it opened and the priest stepping to one side. The service, brief with few hymns, a short summary of a life, sometimes long, more often not. The crypt opened, the smell of old bones released into the air.

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