Category: Haunted Passages

Haunted Passages: “Dear Becca,” a short story by Kate St. Germain

Dear Becca, I’ve wanted to write you for a long time. But on the last episode, GO FOR IT, you told us to go for what we want. So that’s what I’ll do. My grandma died almost 2 months ago. I had been taking care of her, actually I never moved out of our house.…
Emma Aylor: “Ossuary,” a poem for Haunted Passages

On the farm, our border collie lab killedsmall animals. I’d tell people they died from Joy. Once a groundhogjust next to its burrow, head open to skimmed winter sky and the pinkof its brain blurred and scraped at the edges; twice our hens, bodies stretchedin the cage corner, eyelids purpled and closed. Some she could…
Meagan Masterman: “The River Runs Red in Spring,” a Haunted Passages short story

The red in the river wasn’t blood, at first. It was iron. Just sediment eroded from mountain rocks that oxidized in the river long before its waters washed down to us. We lived in a small town that existed because of the river. Our forebears had floated logs down it to be hacked into boards…
Haunted Passages: “Black Magic,” a short story by Karen Petersen

A runaway hippo, typhoid fever, and a charge of theft had not figured in my plans for a tranquil seed collecting expedition in East Africa. I had flown to Nairobi to do some work for a botanical garden and write up a story about it for a national publication. While there, I was going to…
Haunted Passages: “The Unhaunted Poem” by Kim Sousa

X-Files child, Ialways wanted to brush up against the paranormal.Grant me a final girl foggy day. Though, in this only and on-forever life, I never found any ghost outside the mirror. Only bare fruit trees,controlled burns, abandoned hives, their capped and long-dry combs. Only strangerswith cheeks I kiss out of obligation, not gentleness. Their go-with-God…
James A. Reeves: “The Diver,” a Haunted Passages flash fiction

My mother believed life should be graceful and clean, much like the way she entered the water when she was young. She had been a diver and, for a time, the most famous woman in town. Especially once she began killing people. She was an all-city legend, a state champion and regional medalist with a…
Haunted Passages: “Maxwell House’s Demon,” a short story by J. Thomas Murphy

She woke up to the rain and a vague sense of unease. The unease she attributed to the melancholy weather. The rain was nothing new. She started as usual: eating quickly, dressing slowly, letting the morning contain its own patterns and rhythms that she knew the rest of the day could not conform to. On…
Haunted Passages: “Derek, Ricky, Umar, Gael,” a short story by Jackie Sizemore

The first ghost law was supposed to get everybody on better terms with their resident ghosts, but whoever wrote that didn’t know my newest roommate, Amber. Amber is a four-and-a-half foot tall teenage ghost that blew into my apartment two months ago. The whole apocalypse thing was a while back, but everybody knows there are…
“The Storytellers,” a Haunted Passages flash fiction by Kaj Tanaka

The disembodied hands were still a long way off. I mean, we could hear them down the hallway, kind of shambling their way toward us, but it was a long hallway and they were very bad at shambling. Like at one point, we heard them come up against a wall and then shuffle quietly in…