Short, first-person stories about the frightening things ordinary people run into — a neighbor, a stranger, a habit at home no one ever questioned. It's never a ghost.
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Submitted by Corrie — Bellingham, Washington. 39. I am the one who left. That is my whole role in my family and I have never argued with it. I moved from Missouri out to Bellingham in 2015 for a job I do not have anymore, and after that I was the cousin who calls at Christmas and does not come to things. My mother kept a box of cards in the desk drawer by the kitchen phone, the way everybody's mother does. Birthday, sympathy, thinking of you, congratulations on your graduate. She bought them four at a time off the rack at the drugstore when they went on sale and she wrote them at that desk wit
Submitted by Etta — Peoria, Illinois. 54. My mother's memory care building outside Peoria kept a visitor log on the front desk. A bound book with ruled columns — date, visitor, resident, room, time in, time out — and a black pen on a beaded chain screwed to the counter. You signed going in, you signed going out, and the girl at the desk buzzed you through the inner door. I signed that book every Sunday for four years and never once read a line of it that wasn't mine. My mother moved in the spring she stopped recognizing her own kitchen. She had good days. On the good ones she asked about my ki
Submitted by Del — Providence, Rhode Island. 34. I lived on the second floor of a triple-decker on the west side of Providence from 2016 to 2021, and the rent got handled the exact same way for all five years. Bea wrote one check to the management company on the twenty-eighth, took a picture of it, and dropped the picture in our group text. The office wanted one check and did not care how three people got to it, so Bea wrote the split on the memo line herself, in her handwriting, four little numbers with slashes between them. That photo came through every month. I must have looked at it fifty
Submitted by Vince — Kingsport, Tennessee. 41. It was a blue Huffy with a white seat, and I got it the June I turned nine. My mother bought it off a card table at a yard sale two streets over, and my uncle looked it over in our driveway and said the only thing wrong with it was that nobody had ever ridden it. The tires still had the little rubber whiskers on them from the mold, the ones that wear off in a week. He flicked one with his thumbnail to show me. We lived at the low end of a street in Kingsport, Tennessee, and it ran uphill four blocks and flattened out at a gray house with a carport
Submitted by Nell — Chattanooga, Tennessee. 41. There are two coffee tins in the cabinet over our toaster. Same store brand, same red lid, same size, and if you set them on the counter next to each other you would not be able to tell which was which. One of them is decaf. That is the whole difference between them, and it is not a thing you can see standing in a kitchen at six in the morning with your eyes half open. I started having heart stuff in the spring of 2023. That is the only way I know to say it. My heart would go, sitting still, like I had just come up two flights of stairs, and my h
Submitted by Roz — Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. 58. The ladder has been against the back corner of my house since the last week of March. Aluminum, gray, the extension kind, twenty-four foot. One rubber foot is missing, so that leg has worked itself down into the dirt about an inch. The top of it stands three rungs past the gutter. I mow around it. The grass under the bottom rung is a different color than the rest of the yard now. It belongs to Dale. We got hail in March, the kind that sounds like somebody throwing gravel at the windows for six minutes and then quits. By eight the next morning ther
Submitted by Rae — Erie, Pennsylvania. 43. My mother kept the rent in a green payment book about the size of a checkbook. A line for every month, a column for the date, a column for the amount. She wrote in blue pen and never skipped a line, even the two months in 1993 when the amount was zero and she put a slash through the box instead of leaving it blank. When I got old enough to make my letters neat I did the date column for her, because by then her hands went when she was tired. She did the amounts. She said money was hers to write. At the top of the first page there was a name, printed, t
Submitted by Bree — Tulsa, Oklahoma. 41. My insurance card says June 3. I was born June 2. It came that way in the January packet in 2015, and I called member services about it, and a very nice man named Curtis told me he'd put in a correction and it would show on the next card. The next January the new card came and it said June 3. I called again. The third year I didn't call. It's one day. Nobody at a front desk has ever once cared, because they scan the card, and whatever's on the card is what's true. I've carried it in the same slot of the same wallet for eleven years. The corner has gone
Submitted by Tam — Tucson, Arizona. 52. The library in Corry, Pennsylvania keeps its microfilm in the basement, and when I asked for the March 1994 reel the woman at the desk had to go find somebody who knew where the key was. That is the whole of what I went out there for. A page from March. I want to say that up front, because for thirty-two years I have been telling people I don't go home much, and I always said it the way you'd say you don't eat red meat much. A preference. Something I had picked. I left in August of 1993, right after I turned nineteen, for a boy and then for a job and the
Submitted by Ginny — Hattiesburg, Mississippi. 58. My picture on that forum is me at fifteen, sitting at my grandmother's treadle machine in her front room in 1983, my aunt's flash washing out half the wallpaper behind me. I scanned it the winter I joined, in 2011, because everybody there had some kind of machine picture and that was the only one I owned. It is not a good photo. My mouth is open. I never changed it. The forum is for people who fix old sewing machines. Not sew on them, fix them. Hand cranks, treadles, the black cast iron Singers that sat in everybody's great-aunt's spare room.
Submitted by Renee — Chattanooga, Tennessee. 44. Paul and I divorced in the spring of 2017. It was not dramatic the way people expect a divorce to be dramatic. No affair, no screaming. I woke up one morning at thirty-five and understood I had married a man I did not want to grow old with, and I spent the next year doing something about it. He did not fight me on the house or the money. He fought me on Thanksgiving. That is the detail I always led with when I told the story to new friends. He sat across the mediation table and asked, completely serious, whether there was a way to write holidays
Submitted by Cal — Louisville, Kentucky. 46. I travel for work maybe eight or nine weeks a year, installing point-of-sale systems for a restaurant group. In June I had a six-night job in Chattanooga, and the company put me in a hotel off I-24, one of those places with a fireplace nobody lights and a breakfast room that smells like syrup until noon. The first night I got in late, close to one in the morning, and there was a man behind the front desk with a green steel thermos beside the keyboard, paint chipped around the base. He checked me in, made my key cards, told me the ice machine on thre
Submitted by Hal — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 44. For nine years I caught the 71C at the corner of Marlowe and Fifth, the 7:14, downtown to the firm where I do payroll. And for nine years there was a man at that stop before me, every single morning, sitting on the left end of the bench with a folded newspaper in his lap. Older guy. Brown canvas coat, a cap when it got cold. In nine years I never saw him open that paper, and I never saw him get on a bus. I want to be honest about how normal this was, because you would not have noticed him either. The first winter I figured he was waiting on a di
Submitted by Marcy — Scranton, Pennsylvania. 41. I found the apartment nine years ago, the second floor of a green duplex on a street of green duplexes, two bedrooms, and a rent so low I read the listing twice looking for the catch. The catch met me at the door. Gene was the landlord, somewhere in his seventies even then, flannel over flannel, and he showed me the place like he was proud of it, which he was, and when we got to the end of the hallway he put his hand flat on the second bedroom door and said, you won't be needing this one. The door was painted shut. Not stuck. Painted, deliberate
Submitted by Curt — Cumberland, Maryland. 61. I have had service at this address since 2007, and for eighteen years I honestly believed I was somebody's favorite customer. It's the only company that runs a line down our road, so there is no shopping around out here. For the first decade you could pay in person at a storefront on the state highway, between a tax office and a nail place, and I did, because I am my father's son and I like a receipt in my hand. That's where I saw it. The girl behind the counter had her monitor turned a little toward the window, and while she pulled up the account
Submitted by Hal — Green Bay, Wisconsin. 52. I ate lunch under that calendar for eleven years without ever once really looking at it. It hung in our breakroom on the second floor, on a nail beside the microwave. Not a month-at-a-time calendar — one of those laminated year-at-a-glance sheets, all twelve months in columns, about the size of a card table, with the phone number of a heating and cooling company printed across the bottom in red. A new one came in the mail every December and went up on the same nail. Somebody wrote the birthdays on it in marker, a name in the corner of a square, and
Submitted by Shay — Omaha, Nebraska. 43. There is a version of me that only exists between an airport curb and a hotel lobby, and that woman does not look at anybody. I train front-desk staff at regional clinics on a scheduling system. Three weeks out of four I am gone Monday morning to Thursday night, and two years ago my company stopped approving rental cars, because somebody in a spreadsheet worked out that expensing rides is cheaper. So now I come out of baggage claim with a roller bag and a laminated badge and get into whatever pulls up, and I sit behind the passenger seat and answer emai
Submitted by Dee — Erie, Pennsylvania. 43. We got the piano for two hundred dollars in the spring of 2021, which is what an old upright goes for around here. The listing had one blurry photo and three words: good tone, must go. The woman selling it — Colleen — met us in the driveway and didn't haggle and didn't hover. My brother-in-law and I walked it down her two porch steps while she stood in the grass with her arms crossed. Before we pulled away she came to the truck window and said the bench was full and she'd left it that way on purpose. The music should stay with the piano, is what she s
Submitted by Fran — Terre Haute, Indiana. 46. My daughter bought me the DNA kit for Christmas as a joke. I had spent all of Thanksgiving insisting my mother's people came over from Alsace, and she wanted paperwork to make me stop. I spit in the tube the first week of January and then forgot about it the way you forget a jar of change. The card came in March. Grocery store card, cartoon dog in a party hat, the kind you buy when you have four minutes and a birthday you almost missed. Inside, in ballpoint: Many happy returns, Bitsy. Signed, Ray. Bitsy is what my mother's side called me. It came o
Submitted by Lonnie — Duluth, Minnesota. 34. I found the place at eleven at night on my phone, on one of those rental sites, the way everybody finds everything now. One photograph did it. The front room in the afternoon — bare wood floors, one tall window, and a wedge of light lying across the boards like somebody had set it down there. Seven forty a month, second floor of a brick fourplex up on the hillside here in Duluth, heat included. I saved that picture to my camera roll before I even finished the application, and I still have it. That photograph is the reason I live where I live. My sho
Submitted by Bree — Cullman, Alabama. 35. We moved to Cullman the summer I turned eleven, for my dad's job, and we did not know one single person in that town. The second Sunday we went to the church out on the county road, and by that afternoon there was food on our porch. Three dishes that first week. One of them was a heavy white ceramic thing, oval, a chip out of one corner, and a strip of masking tape on the bottom with RUBY on it in ballpoint, the letters gone soft from too many dishwashers. That was the whole system. You brought food in your dish, the family ate it, you got the dish bac
Submitted by Nell — Wichita, Kansas. 44. Miss Fern watched me from the time I was four until I was almost nine. She had the other half of our duplex on the north side of Wichita, and my mother worked evenings at the hospital laundry, so I ate supper at her table four or five nights a week. I remember it as the calmest part of my childhood. Her kitchen was warm and nobody hurried me. She kept a prayer card in the pocket of her housecoat. If you didn't grow up around funerals you might not know the kind — a stiff little thing the size of two stamps side by side, a saint on the front in that wash
Submitted by Wren — Richmond, Virginia. 31. I save the receipt from a first date. Not every receipt, I'm not organized like that. Just the first ones. They go in the little zip pocket inside my purse and I forget about them until the purse wears out and I move everything over. My mother did the same thing with ticket stubs. Proof you went out. Proof you tried. There's one in there right now from a wine bar off Cary Street. Sixty-one forty. The ink has faded down to about the color of weak tea, but you can still read where somebody wrote thanks on it with two exclamation points. The thing you n
Submitted by Nell — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 39. There is a man who plays violin at the north end of the Walnut-Locust platform, and he has been there since I was twenty-four. Brown canvas coat. More gray in him now than there used to be. He sets the case open at his feet with two dollars in it, two singles laid flat and crossed at the corners like an X, and in fifteen years those two dollars have never moved. People drop coins on top of them all morning, and by the next day the coins are gone and the X is still there. I always figured it was a superstition, the way a diner tapes its first
Submitted by Cal — Fort Wayne, Indiana. 41. Everybody at our place keeps things under the glass on their desk. We're a building supply distributor, three warehouses, and the desks came secondhand from an office that closed in the nineties — steel, with a sheet of glass over the top you slide things under. Kids' school pictures. A Colts schedule. A wedding invitation gone yellow at the fold. Dennis had one thing under his. A company badge photo from 2008, back when badges were laminated cardstock and the receptionist shot you against a blue backdrop by the coat closet. A young guy in a tie a li
