Category: Haunted Passages

Haunted Passages Fiction: “On Sarpy, Nebraska, and the Places I Go During a Seizure” by Bella Koschalk

The yellow-bellied swallow has chosen me to facilitate her death. We are sitting on a concrete stoop under The Motel’s awning in the Midwest rain. I hold the bird in my hand and I do not think about bird-borne illnesses. She stirs, she is starting her final surrender. I am wearing my ex-stepbrother’s hand-me-down sneakers,…
“Please Consider an Upgrade,” original short fiction for Haunted Passages by Carrie Bindschadler

Dear Declan, Thank you for your recent purchase of our signature Home Seance Basic Package. This specially-curated package is our most affordable option. This package allows you to contact a single recently-deceased human being or beloved pet one time only. If you are interested in repeat spiritual visitations, you will need to upgrade to the…
Haunted Passages: Two Poems by Matt Wedlock

Tatterdemalion She goes to the laptop on her bed and clicks away with the mouse. It turns white, then cherry colared, then tells herself she needs to update the template. They read for a while, laugh at the link to Waheeda Rehman’s interview in 1996. In the cornerthere’s another tool the techies might send her:…
Haunted Passages Short Story: “How Close Is It?” by Darlene Eliot

Night driving was easy. He knew what to do with a windy mountain pass, a straight shot through cornfields, a detour around streets too narrow for an eighteen-wheeler. He knew what to do when the moon disappeared behind checkpoints and his headlights were the only light on the road. He knew what to do when…
Haunted Passages Poetry: “Phantasmagossip whispered to me between planes, our bodies awake to our mirrored shapes, our ears to the palm of the same bed frame” by Sara Mae

A curve of eyeliner on each side like my sight itself was in brackets, he approached as if to examine me as if to kiss me & remind me what I owed, my heels over the edge of the porch, as above so below, leaving with clowny orange eyeshadow under lower lashes, Persephon-y, & after…
“Winter” by Jesse Lee Kercheval: A Graphic Narrative for Haunted Passages

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. Jesse Lee Kercheval is a writer, translator, and visual artist. Her graphic essays have won awards from New Letters and the New Ohio Review and appeared in the Los Angeles Review and the Superstition Review. Her latest book is the poetry collection, I Want to Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023).
“The Ritual,” a short story for Haunted Passages by Paul Rousseau

The sky was unflinching judgment, set ablaze. Holy shades of red and yellow in acrylic smears. Clouds scrambled to hide behind treetops where they could peek through branches and parted leaves. Night was close. The lights were about to dim. I was getting some final jumpers in at the elementary school playground just down the…
“Ghost Fingers,” a Haunted Passages short story by Justin Carter

Sometime in the 1940s, a school bus in Horton, Texas, was hit by a train after stalling on the tracks. One week later, a truck stalled in the same spot. As a train bared down on the truck, the driver braced for impact, but the truck slowly rolled down off the crossing, just seconds before…
Haunted Passages Digital Collage: “The Frenzy of an Indispensable Hallucination” by Bill Wolak

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. Bill Wolak has just published his eighteenth book of poetry entitled All the Wind’s Unfinished Kisses with Ekstasis Editions. His collages and photographs have appeared as cover art for such magazines as Phoebe, Harbinger Asylum, Baldhip Magazine, and Barfly Poetry Magazine.
“Fugitive,” a new poem for Haunted Passages by Douglas Cole

These junkyards at the edge of cities,towers of wrecks, cars with bloodstill on the driver seat, the windshield—I am looking for a water pump, a new heart. The raw road, the gravel pit,the trailer where I get my insurancefrom a salesman heavy with gold chains.No one around here remembers rain. I am a drive-through ghost.Aren’t…