Category: Haunted Passages

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…
“Last Call,” a Haunted Passages short story by Cassandra Clarke

“The Restaurant of Obscure Sorrows isn’t the best place to work,” I told Alice, “but at least there’s no surprise disappointments … except, when it’s the special.” “Surprise disappointment,” Alice said, one finger raised in the air like she was a game-show contestant, “is sprinkled with sage, the sweat of the hopeful, and sauteed in…
Louis Zieja: Three Ekphrastic Monster Movie Noises for Haunted Passages

Them Ants (’54)“The sounds the giant ants emit in the film were the calls of bird-voiced tree frogs mixed in with the calls of a wood thrush, hooded warbler, and red-bellied woodpecker.” —Them! (1954 Film) Wikipedia It’s a sound reminiscent of rot, of decay, of hunger,the realization that we are just caloriesfor an unknowable colony.…
Three Poems: Lee Hodge for Haunted Passages

HostageAfter Katie Peterson On the night I ended it the police had cordoned off every street surrounding the block to investigate a threat that had been called in on the house across the street from yours. Can’t turn down that road the neighbors had told me before I turned down the road. They pointed at…