When you write it, don’t write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don’t try to give an explanation. Just say that I don’t know what to make of it, just write it like...

Eddie made a half-turn in his seat to face her. “So, what did you think of our hosts?”She chuckled. “I think they could be not-too-distant cousins of the Addams Family.””With Paul as a fuzzy Uncle...

It’s not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they...

I was too much taken up with another interest to care; I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which...

Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving me scarred and sore.

I let out a laugh that sounded more like the yip of a startled poodle. “Superp-powers? I wish. My powers aren’t winning me a slot on the Cartoon Network anytime soon… except as a comic...

This was sharing office space with wacko and bordering on ludicrous.

Banks frown when employees torch the home of their principal account holder.

If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day, but if you teach him to fish, he’ll eat all the fish you might have caught for yourself.–Advice of Paul Slater, the evil...

Empty space eventually fills up with something. A void, cultivated in the aftermath of misfortune, begins to attract the wrong kind of attention. Marco knew it was time to leave when disagreeable spirits started roaming...

Behind a barbed-wire fence, a dirt road disappears into the distance in the pine trees and corners. Lost, dead roads, no ends or remaining purposes, power lines now dead and sagging and forgotten, grown high...

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.

It’s a big spooky place when you’re in it alone. It’s like you can hear all the whispers of all the voices of all the actors who ever played here. Kind of creepy. Like a...

…most words for ghost are pieces of mica that carefully layeredwill make a window out of fire. It’s cold and the faces at the windowdo what faces usually do they open onto a genetic historythat...

He knows different now. It’s the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we...

…she knew, with all her heart that running away from the country’s top relationship coach was as good as saying, ‘there’s no hope for me, ever’!

Words themselves are all the ghosts we need.

Hello? Anyone there?” I ask again. Repeating myself. I am beginning to feel rather anxious now. Scared, would be a better word to use. Shivers have begun to creep up my spinal cord, and I...

That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their rightmind would point at this thing and say, ‘I’m going to fly in my Model-A1’.People would much rather say, ‘Get in my...

Sometimes people graduate but they don’t leave. They hang around for years, for no reason. I would think of ghosts like that, I decided.

The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.Atrocities, however, refuse to be...

The summer I turned eleven, I found out that ghosts are real. Guess it’s hard to rest nice and easy in your coffin if you got stuff on your mind. Your soul stays chained to...

No, you wouldn’t. You love my arse, darling!”, he walked backwards few feet in front of me.His big smile was enough to make me grin and roll my eyes again at him.

Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts. Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan sitting in her window, a bright...

Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds.

Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways… Too often, people make the mistake of trying to use their...

Scarcely has night arrived to undeceive, unfurling her wings of crepe (wings drained even of the glimmer just now dying in the tree-tops); scarcely has the last glint still dancing on the burnished metal heights...

The stinging slap against her cheek whipped her head sideways. Her hand reflexively went to her burning face.”I told you no,” Tobe said, barely above a whisper.Daphne had no words. He’d never so much as...

One warm morning in July, a ghost came to our breakfast table.

I began to doubt that I would ever know the truth of what transpired, or who those people really were. But all that changed one rainy August afternoon, when I was surprised by a dead...

She had been his talisman, his cure for the insecurities and worries that he knew deep down didn’t really matter, but somehow had always managed to get the best of him.

I can also speak to small woodland creatures,” he grins at me.

That, my dear detective, was the other San Francisco. You’ve probably seen it before, just out of the corner of your eye. You’ve probably dismissed it all your life. Maybe you always told yourself you’d...

But more importantly, know I love you more than I can say with simple words. Poets have attempted for centuries to find the perfect combination, and I don’t imagine I shall have more luck than...

I wouldn’t describe myself as lacking in confidence, but I would just say that – the ghosts you chase you never catch.

I was reaching for one of the handles when I heard Heidler’s voice from behind me. ‘It would not be wise to enter. It is a bad time to disturb the dead.

I quickly, swiftly, reach in, pluck out, and peer into the mirror. ‘I am still here.’ I am in the glass, in this moment. After this moment, I may not be here; I may be...

And the kids?””Quincy, nothing. All she wants to do is look for Saturn’s rings and bring home every creature from the pound. Nelson, though, he’s…” She looked at Nicholas. “He’s like you. Gifted, but ignorant.”Nicholas...

Each night at bedtime, I’d close the bedroom door, climb into bed, and settle in under the covers. Within a minute, the door handle would turn and the door slowly open about a foot. Then...

How many ghosts might return to the promenade, haunted by the echoes of those promises, perhaps eager to catch a glimpse of what could have been? Would they laugh at the survivors shuffling about in...

Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which...

The air in the room was so cold, the exposed flesh of his face felt like ice. “I’ll be the first person to get frostbite in a house sleeping several feet from a roaring fire.

Ghosts! […] I almost think we are all of us ghosts. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that ‘walks’ in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas,...

Usually we normally shake hands and say ‘hi’ but last night he was like a ghost, just white.

The dead can be even more frustrating to deal with than are many of the living, which is astonishing when you consider it’s the living who run the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Psychoanalysis is often about turning our ghosts into ancestors, even for patients who have not lost loved ones to death. We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in...

Calm down. Ghosts don’t ring the doorbell.

He thinks you were trapped in a tree in the 1920s. How is that not crazy?

I don’t believe in the white spectre-type of ghosts you get in stories, but what if ghosts are something else? Like memories somehow caught and trapped in time, released by being in certain places where...

Kissing Red must’ve killed off some of your brain cells,” Ryder decided. “You can tell a woman what to do—if you play it right—and maybe, maybe half the time she’d do it, or something close...