Category: Haunted Passages

“Ghost Tree,” a concrete visual poem by Tara Campbell for Haunted Passages

InMuirWoodsthere areredwood treesthat are completelywhite, lacking allchlorophyll. They’re called ghost trees, and theydot the forest, ivory boughsglowing against a backgroundof cinnamon bark and pine-needle green.Because they don’t have chlorophyll these albino trees aren’t able tophotosynthesize. They can’t producetheir own food, relying instead on nutrientsfrom the redwoods around them, absorbed throughan underground network of roots and…
“The Butchers”: A Fiction Excerpt from The Future by Alana I. Capria

On Sundays, we butchered. It made us so happy, S— and me. We did not mind the blood or sound. We butchered what crouched and quivered, what was soft against a knife. S— and I butchered until our hands were wet. We prepared the butchering for a meal, for stews, steaks, and roasts. I carried…
Haunted Passages: “A Quiet Place to Sleep,” fiction by Nicole C. White

Angelica finds herself in the nexus of several intersecting red corridors. Everything is red: the walls, the stucco ceiling, the trim, the plush carpets. Each corridor recedes into the far distance and is studded with doors spaced at irregular distances apart, and each door has above it a tubular fluorescent bulb. But the bulbs are…
Hugh Behm-Steinberg Flash Fiction: “Wallace Stevens”

Anecdote of the Jar I placed a jar in Tennessee,And round it was, upon a hill.It made the slovenly wildernessSurround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it,And sprawled around, no longer wild.The jar was round upon the ground.And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere.The jar was gray and bare.It…
Jonathan Louis Duckworth: Three Wendigo Poems for Haunted Passages

Wendigo III Rasp of rawhide, knock of bone on hollow bone, clatter of loose broad teeth set in cervine jaw, jangle of beads of glass & obsidian & cowrie, sounds that fill your footprints like snowmelt. You know wendigo is following you. Dokeep walking. Do notlook back. Dorub your hands together—warmth will protect you. Do…
“The Ghosts at the Carwash Are Always Looking for Company”: Flash Fiction by Cathy Ulrich

There is a universe where all the carwashes are haunted. Where there are creaks and groans and disembodied hands dripping with carwash water. Where our mothers sat us down since we were young, said never go to the carwash, said or you could end up a haunt there too, said when the first carwash was…
“Unclear Motives”: Short Fiction for Haunted Passages by Chase Dearinger

The very last thing: the roof rose up seamlessly from the house, sat perfectly still a hundred feet above the lights and chaos in the street. The ground quaked and calmed, and a murder of countless crows poured out from the house, their oily, rainbow flap like a deck of cards splashed across a room.…
“Ghosts”: Five Poems by Conor Scruton for Haunted Passages

Pareidolia In summer we make stories for the ungrowing seasons,the sweatspeckled back of the blue sky made real in its telling,each winter to come. Some of what we know—we can only make out in contrast. I cannot give you muchbut another season’s worth of words, this basket I hold to my stomach,these petals I take…
“Unhaunted,” a short story for Haunted Passages by Madeleine Sardina

The ghosts had always been loud. Like rats or squirrels, they scampered in and out of our homes, tampering with the wiring and knocking on bedposts. We had our ways of softening their effects so we could keep our homes and schools and workplaces functional, but it was an art to keep them at bay…