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Use a personal memory to craft a ghost story.

Posted in Dramatic on Oct 25, 2024

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✍️ 71 stories

Matilda

Submitted to Contest #274

“Ooh, spooky!” I exclaimed as Brea brought the box with the Ouija board up from downstairs, tape cracking and peeling from the corners. It was a chilly Saturday on Hallow’s Eve, and the windows were barely cracked open behind us, the smell of freshly fallen leaves and sweet apple pie wafting in on the wind. The two of us clambered onto her twin-size bed, sitting cross-legged atop black and orange unmade blankets patterned with tiny skulls and pumpkins. A clear bucket of miscellaneous candy we’d bought at Price Chopper earlier that day lay be...

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The Pond

Submitted to Contest #274

A friend of mine posted a picture on Facebook today. It was Long Hollow Stormwater Pond in Pensacola. It’s unusual in that it was built back in the 1940s as a pond to collect stormwater runoff, but it has since grown to the size of a small lake. Nobody really knows it’s back there and exactly who is supposed to make decisions about what happens to it, so it’s just staying a bit of a hidden gem. I remembered Long Hollow. About twenty years ago, I had just finished my graduate degree in Counseling and Psychology with the pl...

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The Woman Who Loved Stephen King

Submitted to Contest #274

The man at the entrance mistook Claire Creegan for one of the volunteers. “Coat check needs help,” he said, waving toward a red velvet stanchion. Claire apologized for his mistake and explained that she was with the event. He looked dubious even after scanning the QR code that allowed her into the foyer of what was once the summer home of a shipping magnate. Claire stood awestruck before a marble staircase, gold leaf walls, and hundreds of red poinsettias in the shape of a twenty-five-foot Christmas tree. Some may embrace the ostentatious d...

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Harbinger

Submitted to Contest #274

HarbingerDeath is absence, drowning in black. Clinging to the memories of people you love as they dissolve into nothingness.When I wake my throat is aching and my cheeks are wet with tears.“Oh,” I say out loud to my husband. “I do miss you.”Reaching out I am surprised to find he is lying next to me. He gives a grunt of a snore, unaware of the relief I feel.I am not dead. Just dreaming.The cat lying at the end of the bed lets out a cat snarl because my dead brother stands at the end of the bed, smiling.“I miss you too,” he says.I’m stuck betw...

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Sundown

Submitted to Contest #274

Why am I here? Crows call from the swaying branches of the trees, the wind sweeping through the open playground into the neighborhood beside the abandoned school. Cold air sways rattles the chains of the swing set behind me. I smell the old metal of those swings, of the nearby monkey bars, the dull sliding board, and the dirt of the abandoned grammar school playground. A shiver wracks my body as twilight sets in a place passing into decay. But I don’t see decay. I see colorful leaves blowing through the sunshine, swirling in the cheers and ...

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The Trappings of Fall

Submitted to Contest #274

The memory spider inside my brain spins her webs, silken threads of moments. She spins a colorful October of red, orange, and yellow. The colors fall around me, they float down the street, they hide under my feet. My October web smells of leaves, campfires, and sweet candy. My October web looks like glowing Jack-o-Lantern faces, full white moons, yellow glowing eyes of a black cat in the alley.  A sound makes my October web vibrate,rattle, and shake. It’s the sound of a child’s cry. A scream. I can’t get the scream out of my memory web....

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A Personal Account of an Earring's Journey to the Other Side

Submitted to Contest #274

How can I find the words? It was infinitely worth millions, an enlightenment in an otherwise ordinary existence – an escape into fantasy or an abundance of things derived from an unimaginable realm. In an experience unlike any other, it was thus, my journey began. The night was ordinary, much like any other, but dark and quiet with an ominous foreboding of something otherworldly in the air. My mistress slept in her ornate antique bed with only the smallest sliver of moonlight to illuminate the room. Unable to rest, I lay on the mahogany...

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Quiet Shadow

Submitted to Contest #274

Michael Hughes set his teacup down with practiced grace, eyeing across the veranda. Behind him, a red pagoda cast long shadows over his otherworldly garden, where solemn statues stood sentinel among unfamiliar plants. His blue-grey eyes, piercing and astute, seemed to look through Margaret. "Drawn by the occult, are you, Miss Hodgkins?" His voice coarse and unfeeling. “I understand Gothic fiction is quite popular these days among the youth.” Margaret nodded weakly, relaxing a bit as the familiar subject took hold. "It’s for my writing assign...

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The Bell Tower

Submitted to Contest #274

As far back as I can remember, I have always felt different. I don't say that as something that I'm proud of. My mother was the first to point this out, and she described it almost as a disability. "That boy is not right in the head," she would say. "It's that damn Nintendo." Like most Mexican parents, they loved to blame any behavior issue on those damn Nintendos. Mental health problems are too unknown or too taboo to be discussed openly in the Mexican household. They say we reflect our parents' virtues, but it’s their failures that ma...

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A Haunting in Vietnam

Submitted to Contest #274

Author's note: The event of this story is true and happened to my parents when we visited Vietnam in 2006. Names have been changed for privacy.****I heard the knife before ever seeing it. The sound it made cut through the quiet night, sharp and clean. Sleep was settled in my bones, invisible strings tugging my eyelids, and I struggled to fight it—but something in my guts screamed at me to wake. I ripped the strings and opened my eyelids— rubbing at the blurriness.Strange noises teetered at the edge of my awareness, but lucidity hadn’t found ...

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The Garage

Submitted to Contest #274

Maria and Carmen DiLilliano had some friends over. They were contacting the dead and wanting to speak to an old friend who recently passed, using a trumpet. They frequently held a séance in their home for various purposes and usually met their goals. Sal, their grandson, was spending the night at their house, and they put him to bed maybe a little earlier than usual. It is not his time yet to learn of these things. He had heard them talking about the cone or the trumpet before but never ventured to see what was happening. However, he got out...

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The dark that holds

Submitted to Contest #274

Most children are taught to fear the dark.It’s not an innate fear; after all, I can’t imagine much light makes its way into the womb, that safe place we will never return to. In bedtime stories, villains slither in the shadows, sneaky and sinister, and we soon learn to associate light with everything safe and darkness with everything that isn’t.The astute reader might have already guessed that, in this story, everything will happen the other way around, while the curious reader will find themselves caught in the tight weave of my words, wond...

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Renovation Ghosts

Submitted to Contest #274

This was based on a true story. Something that happened to me and my family. It was close to the end of the pandemic, and during the pandemic, we had to renovate a house for us to move in temporarily. I was sixteen, and my mental health wasn’t at its peak at the time. I mean, moving during the pandemic, it wasn’t pleasant. We all had to help with the renovations or with babysitting my baby sister. The house we were renovating wasn’t very creepy at first. It was an old Victorian house, with asbestos and cartoon stuffed animals, but it wasn’t ...

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Crossing Paths

Submitted to Contest #274

                              Word Count 1330 CROSSING PATHS            A true story                  The woods that encircle the old Cemetery in Jacksonville, Southern Oregon, are fast disappearing, but there are still...

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3:00 a.m.

Submitted to Contest #274

Cara was rigid, her fists clenched as she stared at the glowing numbers on the display beside her. It had just turned three o'clock in the morning, the dead of night - the witching hour. No matter the name, that time of night had now become the focus of Cara's existence. Bedtime had gone from unremarkable to an anxious waiting game for tiny lightsabers to change through their numerical sequence each night until they reached that time. The door hinges squealed, heralding Cara's punctual visitor. Cara swallowed futilely against her stubbornly ...

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