No one really knows why restoration stopped on the abandoned St. Julian hotel, where commoners and kings once came to relax in luxury.But Bernie Yocum and her brother George Winton had their suspicions. The renovation/construction company they shared had been in their family for decades.
Continue reading “Restless Souls by Alice Baburek”
Our house was what dreams were made of—a hazy vision of lost grandeur, countless rooms, and long corridors leading to an airy parlour. A crumbling gilded ceiling glittered in the light seeping through tall windows. A polished table with a deep, glassy sheen, where I sat my laptop, stood on the elegant curve of Queen Anne’s legs. Georgian bookcases were crowded with dusty oil lamps, their glass chimneys catching the cold, sterile shine of fairy LED lights. A heavy marble fireplace, its mantle cluttered with birthday cards, roared into the night.
Continue reading “Timeless Sympathy by Hana Carolina”
Once more I see myself, 11 years old, standing at the corner of the lane, and gazing through the wire-mesh fence. My three companions stand beside me. It’s late summer, early evening, the sky a bold and ever-deepening blue, the day seeming to go on without end. But gathering in the alleys and in the eaves of the houses, around the doorsteps and the feet of the lampposts, shadows are thickening, and already a scent of autumn sharpens the air. And before us, harbouring its own shadows, stands the witch house.
Continue reading “The Witch House by David Calcutt”
Acacia knew her calling from the age of ten. Noticing all her clothes were labeled ‘MEDIUM’ and, being a highly impressionable girl, she naturally assumed the universe, or possibly a parallel one, was offering a clear hint as to her correct career path.
Continue reading “Is There Anybody There? By Michael Smith”
Author’s Note
Orville Baumgardner is the chattiest of men. He grew up in an Indiana farm town, graduated from a small rural college with gentlemen’s Cs, and used his gift of gab to get elected to the Indiana House of Representatives. Orville prides himself on having read over two hundred books, including most of the classics, yet sustained a career as a populist politician by promoting deep state conspiracy theories to his constituents. After twenty years, Orville gave up politics because he had a crisis of conscience. He has since lectured on numerous topics, including abortion, book banning, and corporate corruption, and his spiels have appeared in many literary journals. Although he has recently left this world, he continues to lecture in the afterlife.
Continue reading “Orville Baumgardner and the Morning Glories byJames Hanna”
Morning breaks the window open, sets sunlight to shatter on the floor, the scorpions to scatter. They run for walls, but Jordan climbs from bed, his dream head raw, brooms them to the door.
Continue reading “The Crying Girl by Victor D Sandiego”
Syd walked along the narrow path of flattened grass between the gravestones just like he always did. On his walk home from work, on his way to the shops, on lonely days couped up at home watching the rain pour down his window panes he came to the graveyard. He walked through the melancholy bluebells that lined its edges, past balloons tied to pristine headstones and sad teddies left in the middle of graves to keep the dead company until he got to Liam. To the black marble with his date of birth and death, the little line etched across the bottom of it that was meant to sum up his whole life. Who he was. What he was. But it couldn’t, it was too small. Too dull. It blended in with all the other messages on all the other graves but nothing about Liam had ever blended in.
Continue reading “Lonely Ghosts.by Rebecca Disley “
I think it’s quite common for people to chat to their dead parents/spouse/buddies from time to time. In Andy’s case, he would chat to his dead dad, usually when the car was stuck in traffic. Andy’s dad had been a no-nonsense kinda guy and his contributions to these conversations tended towards telling Andy not to be so bloody daft; which advice Andy usually found helpful.
Continue reading “Hindsight and Occupational Choices by Michael Bloor”
There are two types of nurses: the ones who believe in ghosts, and the ones who are lying.
We don’t talk about it much, especially now that the war is over. You can feel it more than see it when we’re together—a collective haunting, invisible guests at the dinner table. The conversations lulls and our gazes drift and we stare at strangers we’ve seen somewhere before. Was it the operating table? A hospital bed? The morgue?
You do this kind of thing for years and eventually everyone becomes a ghost of someone, somewhere. We don’t talk about it much.
But sometimes we get drunk.
Continue reading “The Magician of Sixth Avenue by Sam Mueller”
A soft, steady breeze, with no puff to it, lifted over the edge of Horseshoe Creek and carried with it the sooty odor of a dead fire, a dank, drifting smell that came like the death of an animal a man has long known, perhaps a favorite horse, like a black stallion unseen at night but a dark star in the sunlight. Another person might say the odor was of an old market in a corner of town or an old home left to rot in the wake of a hundred battles that raged around it, the inhabitants, a man and his whole family, gone to dust in one of those fierce battles, so that their essence alone remained of them. One could almost see the house as it stood decorated with gardens, pet animals, and lusty children bouncing with life. Yet the odor, despite various images passersby would have, remained the cold, dank ashes of a fire long gone into night’s realm, thus it came back each and every nightfall thereafter.
Continue reading “The Ghosts at Horseshoe Creek by Tom Sheehan”
literally stories 