As I pulled into an almost vacant lot in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the cars of the few Saturday patrons and library staff parked, I noticed a pale woman wearing a cream-colored dress, its lace browned faintly around the cuffs. Her face possessed the pale stillness of old photographs. Her eyes shifted strangely, as if several people were considering me from behind them at once.
“Good morning,” I said to her.
Continue reading “Specificity by Ryan Scribner”
The same place: Hampstead Heath. A misty London morning, the rising sun at times peeking through the pea-souper; joggers, dog walkers, city slickers taking a short cut, coffees in hand, trailed by confused people with no inclination to be doing anything, but stumbling around like zombies searching for a familiar face. Me: Canon in hand, covert, waiting for that magic pic to arrive – I’m poised.
Continue reading “The Forever Bench by SJ Butler “
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”
It’s not the kind of question you ask at breakfast. It waits. Lurks. Slinking into the places you’d rather not be: in the mildew-laced corners of motel rooms, the backseats of rental cars with traces of stale breath and strangers, the forgotten pews of ruined chapels where the wind mumbles louder than God.
Continue reading “Are Ghosts Real? By Katelynn Humbles”
Prelude: Native American legend has it that the Pascagoula tribe preferred death by drowning to lives of enslavement by their enemies. According to one “mist of time” story, men, women, and children were heard chanting to their ancestors while walking en masse into this Mississippi coastal river. Receptive listeners, recreating on these waters, have long reported phantom music. In 1985, historians successfully lobbied for a name change, from the Pascagoula to the Singing River.
Continue reading “The Night the River Sang by Claire Massey”
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”
“We were just here,” said Ned. “Why do we have to visit so often?”
“It’s been a whole year.” Emma took his arm. “Some folks do this a lot more often than that.”
Continue reading “The Visit by Kurt Hohmann”
At first, long before he became aware of whispers, the stones in the cemetery trembled at his touch; not all of the stones, but only those on graves belonging to people he had known in life: comrades, teammates, family members, girlfriends, lovers – or the stones memorializing those who hurt him in life or those he had hurt. Once in a while he never knew what the difference was.
Continue reading “Whispers in the Grass by Tom Sheehan”
Schiehallion, aka The Faery Hill of the Caledonians, is a magnificent, isolated, rugged, limestone ridge in Highland Perthshire, in the plumb-centre of Scotland. I’ve climbed it many times in the past, but now my arthritic knees deny me that pleasure: the jarring of the knees taken all the enjoyment out of hill-walking. So what the hell am I doing now, struggling along Glen Mór, on the south side of Schiehallion, in the November sleet, with a giant ship-in-a-bottle in my rucksack?
Continue reading “The Otherworld Hiding Place by Michael Bloor”
literally stories 