These are our scary ghost stories and paranormal stories: haunted houses, haunted objects, and the dead who never quite left. An ornament on the family tree that nobody hung. A baby monitor that picks up a lullaby from an empty room. A mirror from an estate sale that shows the room a few seconds late.Not every haunting is loud. Many of the creepy ghost stories here are quiet, patient, and sad, the kind you keep thinking about the next day. Others are not quiet at all. If you want the scariest ones first, start with our best horror stories, or let the random story button choose a haunting for you.
Ghost hunters split hauntings into two kinds. A residual haunting is like a recording. The same footsteps, the same voice, the same scene replaying at the same time, over and over, with no awareness of the living. An intelligent haunting is something that knows you’re there. For eight months, I lived under a residual haunting. … Read more
I never cared about cemetery ghost stories until someone started leaving fresh dahlias on my father’s grave every week. They were his own dahlias, from the garden he planted, at a house our family had already sold. My town has its share of haunted graveyard stories. I never thought my family would end up in … Read more
Most ghost hunting stories you see online are fake. I know because I used to make them. My friend Corey and I ran a small ghost hunting channel for two years, and we were not above a little creative editing. But the night we spent at an old county poor farm in Indiana, our recorder … Read more
Most scary Ouija board stories start with teenagers at a sleepover asking a dead kid questions. I never asked mine anything. I never even put my fingers on it. The pointer moved by itself every night anyway, one letter at a time, and it was looking for somebody named Margaret. I collect board games, not … Read more
I’d read haunted hotel stories online and rolled my eyes at every one. Cold spots, footsteps, a lady in white at the end of the hall. Then I spent five nights in Room 309 of an old railroad hotel in Montana, and every time I hung the Do Not Disturb sign, somebody turned it around … Read more
This haunted house story is about a rotary phone that wasn’t connected to anything. It rang five times on our first Halloween in the house, and every time, the same old woman asked me the same question. I’d always rolled my eyes at scary Halloween ghost stories. Then I picked up the phone. My husband … Read more
This lighthouse ghost story started with a cardboard box from an estate sale and a logbook that should have been in the National Archives. The keeper of Gannet Point was lost on Lake Superior in November 1923, but the entries in his handwriting went on for three more days. I volunteer two afternoons a week … Read more
This haunted elevator story comes from a night security guard in Phoenix and a fourth floor that had been gutted down to bare concrete. Nobody had any reason to go up there, but every night at 2:17, the elevator went up anyway. I worked nights as a security guard in an office building in Phoenix … Read more
The mirror had sat in my grandmother’s attic for as long as anyone could remember — a tall, antique thing in a heavy carved frame, always covered with an old bedsheet. As a child, I was told never to uncover it, and like most rules given to children, this one only made me more curious. … Read more
The first time I saw the old woman at the foot of my bed, I was certain I was dreaming. I woke in the dead of night, the way you sometimes do for no reason, and there she was — a small, hunched figure in a dark shawl, standing perfectly still at the foot of … Read more