Like any other day in South Carolina in 1972, it was a quiet, peaceful morning. The sun was rising and everything was fine. Every morning and every night, there was an old lady upstairs always saying hello in her house, waving her hand to people who walked by. 

That night, at the stroke of midnight, everything was foggy. Nobody could see a thing. Right across the street there was a serial killer on the loose. The killer crossed the street into a house, the house where the old, lonely lady was. The killer went up the stairs and walked into her room. Quickly the killer got the knife and stabbed her, leaving her to her own bloody death. She screamed with pain, making a lot of noise. She got her nails and scratched on the windows, making the most sharpest little noise that would make your ears bleed. She screamed for hours and no one saved her.

The police arrested the serial killer and took the old lady’s body. Everyone heard the terrible news and were in mourning. At midnight Sarah heard an eerie scream from the old lady’s house. She went inside the house and up the stairs where the scream came from. She heard the old lady say, “I screamed night and day in pain and yet no one came to my aid. Why didn’t you come after me, why? WHY?!?” 

Sarah ran toward the door, cold sweat coming from her face. She grabbed the knob and twisted it, but the door refused to open. The sound of the old lady grew louder and louder, creeping through her ears, “I screamed night and day in pain and yet no one came to my aid! Why didn’t you come after me? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” Her voice started to fade, “Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” 

Sarah turned the knob, but the door still refused to open. She was hitting the door as loudly as she could, so someone could hear her. “Now you must know how I felt on that treacherous day I suffered through,” the old lady said, with anger and hatred. 

A shiny, sharp knife appeared. “There’s only one way out with that knife, you know what to do.” Isabel screamed in terror, not knowing, not thinking straight. She got the knife and tried to break down the door. It was useless and she was helpless. Warm tears went down her cheeeks. She got the knife and killed herself.

The police went in the next morning and saw nothing. Everything, the knife, the body, all gone. No one knew what happend to Sarah. All that was said was that she went into the house and never came back. They closed the doors and Shut all the windows tight. Now, you can hear Sarah’s cry from behind the door that the police said never to open, because no one was there. Forty years passed and Sarah’s body is still missing, her spirit is forever in the house.

—Enrique R.

“I don’t think this is a good idea, Tristan,” I whispered.

“Are you scared?” he asked, his lips twisting at the edge of a smirk.

I looked up at the huge abandoned house. It was ancient, the paint peeling away like sunburned skin, the wood that boarded up the windows rotting. It seemed to sag under the weight of the darkness.

“No,” I lied.

“Then come on,” he said, walking down the overgrown path.

I paused, biting my lip, before following my older brother. The sliver of moon cast sharp shadows that grew teeth and claws at the edge of my vision. The weeds scratched at my legs. Hurrying to catch up with Tristan I bonked into him in the dark.

“Hey, watch it Sophie,” he said.

“Sorry. But you’re the one carrying the flashlight,” I pointed out.

“Aww, the little girl is scared of the dark.”

“Shut up. I’m thirteen, idiot,” I hissed.

We just stared at the ancient oak door for a moment before Tristan reached for the metal handle.

The door swung open.

We crept inside. Parts of the ceiling were collapsing, and spider webs snaked across everything. It stank of mold. Even with the flashlight we could hardly see where we were going.

Tristan paused, his head cocked to one side, “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Shh! Just listen.”

That was when I heard it.

“It’s just the wind?” I whispered hopefully.

We didn’t get wind in the summer.

Tristan and I tiptoed down the hallway. My whole body was screaming for me to run, but some instinct kept driving me forward.

It kept getting louder.

Finally he paused at a door, his hand fluttering there like a pale moth, before he gently pushed it open. The music sent shivers down our spines.

A young woman sat at a white piano, her long fingers dancing along the keys. Her voice rose and fell eerily, the unearthly notes suspended in the darkness, heartache bleeding from her words.

I found myself paralyzed, I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t breathe.

All I could do was watch her.

Her ebony her cascaded down her back, a scarlet rose was tucked behind a deathly pale ear. A beam of moonlight shone through one of the cobwebbed windows, casting the piano’s shadow across the littered floor. I managed to direct my gaze downwards, to the shadow of her chair; to where her shadow should have been.

But the moonlight went right through her.

She ended the song, the last notes trailing into nothingness. She pulled the rose out of her hair and looked at it bitterly, before tossing it on top of the piano.

Suddenly she turned her head towards us. Her eyes shone a bright, throbbing red.

She got up and started walking towards us, her black dress trailing across the floor.

I jerked back into my body, and backed up quickly, tripping and falling on my butt. Tristan didn’t move.

She stepped closer.

I got up and grabbed Tristan by the back of his shirt and dragged him away. A few feet from the door we started sprinting, running out of the house as fast as we could.

As we tore down the path, we could still hear the sound of her hollow, broken laughter.

 …. 

The next day our parents decided to take a hike down past the haunted house. Forced along, Tristan and I lagged behind a few yards, panting in the heat.

“That was just a nightmare, right?” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

“Yeah. We both had the same nightmare,” he said uncertainly.

We looked down at the back of the house. It wasn’t much less creepy in the daytime.

Coming to the same unspoken agreement, we ran to one of the unboarded windows and peeked in through the spiderwebs.

In a shaft of sunlight stood the white piano, covered in layers of dust.

And on top of the piano lay a fresh, scarlet rose. The petals were just starting to wilt. The edges barely turning brown.

We stared at it for a moment.

Then we slowly turned, and walked back to where our parents were strolling.

“Did you know this used to be a beautiful rose garden?” our mother chatted, gesturing to the yard full of sickly weeds.

“They all died though, about fifty years ago, when the house was deserted,” she laughed, “At least that’s what I’ve been told by a few of the locals. Apparently that building has quite a tragic history.”

They then started talking about other, dull things. More things they wanted to do during the vacation, the weather, politics.

And Tristan and I, we never said anything about what we’d seen.

Sometimes though, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, and I think I can hear her singing.

—Sequoia M.: work from the 826 Valencia workshop: “How to Write a Ghost Story”

When my grandmother was little and still lived on a farm, she was always lonely with her mother and father. As she was growing up, she was very poor. Her family lost money. They lost their house. They had to move to a better place. Many people made up stories about them and why they moved. But they never liked it there.

In the new house, every night, they would hear large cries in the middle of the night, footsteps outside of the little room at exactly 3 am.

People always talked about how a man was killed in his sleep in their new house. The family was baffled by why they were hearing these sorts of things. During the night, you could hear screaming right out by where the cows were, just by the little barn. Many people moved from there, but my grandmother didn’t want to go. She decided to come back when she was old enough to live on her own. She was never afraid of anything. She said she wanted to catch the thing, the ghost?

She decided to sleep outside in a car. Then at exactly 3 am she heard noises like a dog that was barking right outside of the house. But she didn’t have dogs. At first, she couldn’t make out what it was.

It walked toward the car slowly. Now she was scared. It was getting closer and closer. She just saw a dark figure. When the moonlight shone upon it, she saw it was big, hairy, smelly and scary looking.

It was a dog with no head!  A headless dog walking. My grandmother closed her eyes and started to pray. Moments later, it was gone.

The next day, a priest came over and brought holy water. He went around the house sprinkling holy water to bless the house.

After that the dog never returned again. People still say it has appeared in other places. It is still out there somewhere.

—Anthony Q.

My little cousin went to a museum in New Mexico with her mom. They stopped at a display of old Native American clothing. She looked, eyes wide, and asked, “Who is that lady?” The clothes hung on a wire stand; there was no lady there that my aunt could see, but her little girl kept insisting. “She has no head! Look, she has no head!” Trying not to attract a crowd, they walked away as my cousin continued to look back.

Once, a long time ago, there were few people living here in California. Among those families, there was the Floreses. They were always quite unusual, but no one could quite put their finger on it.

Mr. Daniel Flores and Mrs. Samantha Flores had three daughters named Kathy, Veronica, and Valerie. These three girls one day mysteriously disappeared after their parents went inside to bring out Valerie’s favorite toy. The girls were last seen on the porch; then, they vanished.

They say that every 50 years, the three little girls haunt the next generation of children that live in that same house.

It had been 150 years and little Lucy Cornejo was having her first sleepover since she moved to Los Angeles. She was in the 5th grade and it was her birthday. She and her friends were talking about the cutest guy in their class, Jake. All of a sudden, Lucy’s best friend Steffany claimed to have heard something upstairs. Then, Lucy heard it too. It sounded like someone pounding on a door. Lucy went with Steffany to see what was making the noise. They opened the door and as it creaked open, they saw three little girls playing hopscotch. All of a sudden, they didn’t look like little girls anymore, they looked more like demons with red horns and started screaming, “Mommy! Daddy! Help us!” And they vanished along with the two girls never to be seen again.