##ghostadvent
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carrielaben.com
"He saw no recognizable chain store nor familiar corporate logo, save the yellow and red Shell sign impaled on a long pole many yards above a shack of a gas station, glowing like a blood-smeared moon."

weirdfictionreview.com/2017/10/spet...

#ghostadvent with @mattmbartlett.bsky.social
A garbage bin with a wrought iron decoration that looks like an eye.
December 22, 2024 at 11:42 PM
carrielaben.com
"...Ursula would walk into town each morning because she imagined her sister’s house was pushing her out like a splinter of wood under the skin."

#ghostadvent Night 17: Her Alberta by @malcolmdevlin.bsky.social

www.weirdhorrormagazine.com/her-alberta
Two very similarly-colored light-gray red-eyed marten rats. The left, smaller one is Cervantes, nearly a month old, and the right, larger one is his mother Cowen.
December 15, 2025 at 12:54 AM
carrielaben.com
"Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,
And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans"

allpoetry.com/A-Christmas-...

#ghostadvent

And to all a good night.
St. Michael's cemetery in Queens, NY. Uneven rows of fairly plain gravestones stretch across the lawn towards some autumn-colored trees. The nearest stone has a small bird perched on it - possibly a palm warbler.
December 24, 2024 at 10:44 PM
carrielaben.com
"You keep your eyes averted
from the mirror as you turn on the light - a childhood instinct, a good one."

www.cottonxenomorph.com/journal/2024...

#ghostadvent I'm finally back with new short fiction!
The author, a white bespectacled genderqueer person with pulled-back blond hair, on a mountaintop with some conifers and more mountains in the background.
December 4, 2024 at 9:49 PM
carrielaben.com
"Natalie was lonely, and thirty years too late, I finally understand what loneliness means."

#ghostadvent Night 26: Most Likely To... (Class of 1997) by @acwise.bsky.social

www.thedarkmagazine.com/most-likely-...
A creek at sunset, with greenish water and bare trees.
December 24, 2025 at 1:07 AM
carrielaben.com
“I have a wife and a child,” Mitya said. “I don’t need this. The farmer who had no troubles just had to buy a pig, as they say.”

#ghostadvent Night 3 - Punks Don't Die by my personal long-time fave @esedia.bsky.social

psychopomp.com/deadlands/is...
Landscape with dead trees and lush meadow regrowth along the North Fork of the Flathead River in Montana. There is a large log house in the distant background and beyond that, mountains.
November 30, 2025 at 11:51 PM
carrielaben.com
"I had my Library Science degree in one hand, a beer constantly in the other. Officially, I was taking a post-graduation break before entering the rat race"

weirdfictionreview.com/2012/10/xebi...

#ghostadvent with @sgj.bsky.social
A brownstone at night. We are looking down an external stairway with an iron railing; a door with an iron grate and a single bright light above it is just visible. A pigeon is flying up into the shot but it appears as an ambiguous white blur.
December 17, 2024 at 11:03 PM
carrielaben.com
"My heart is meat
and gristle, like Artaud’s: a simple
pump, it never falters."

#ghostadvent Night 24: Letter From a Haunted Room by Lisa Sewell

poets.org/poem/letter-...
Cervantes, a month-old red-eyed marten rat, being held by a potato enby hand with green glitter nail polish. He's hiding his nose under a finger.
December 21, 2025 at 11:58 PM
carrielaben.com
"As ordered, I continued walking the path. I refused to think about what I was leaving behind."

#ghostadvent Night 23: Waystations Lost by @andrewkozma.net

www.seizethepress.com/2024/09/18/w...
A gray rosette of lichen on a gray tombstone.
December 20, 2025 at 11:10 PM
carrielaben.com
"Turned out Aunt Suzie and Aunt Ruth and Aunt Iffie all died in a house fire fifteen years before I was born."

#ghostadvent Night 16: Courtney Lovecraft's Book of the Dead. Goddamn, we love @sentencebender.bsky.social over here.

www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/cour...
A blue glass evil eye charm on black corduroy.
December 14, 2025 at 4:01 AM
carrielaben.com
"Maybe we’ll meet in the city we knew, in the country that bore us."

#ghostadvent Night 4: Gash Wondimu by Agazit Abate

www.warscapes.com/literature/g...
A pink-barred pseudeustrotia moth (more tan than pink really) on an equally tan pillowcase with a woven texture.
December 1, 2025 at 11:43 PM
carrielaben.com
"I know the prayers. She’d etched them into my gray matter, laying each down like steel bars over gaping windows."

#ghostadvent Night 2: Drown-Haunted by veteran ghost-adventeer @coreyfarrenkopf.bsky.social

www.flashfictiononline.com/article/drow...
Two empty yellow-ish snail shells on a cracked pavement.
November 30, 2025 at 12:49 AM
carrielaben.com
"I don’t remember the hall being this big. I remember it being crammed with sticky bodies. Always so fiendishly hot."

#ghostadvent Night 22: Mrs. Charbury at Eltham by Max Porter

lithub.com/mrs-charbury...
Two zebra finches, one leucistic and one standard-colored, in a large glassed-in enclosure with a small section of tree trunk, ladder, nest box, dishes, etc.
December 20, 2025 at 1:15 AM
carrielaben.com
"Her eyes to him must look like a pair of Christmas ornaments glinting in the dark, familiar but frightful."

#ghostadvent Night 21 - Saint Gremmy by @robertarjoyan.bsky.social

psychopomp.com/deadlands/is...
A trail-cam image of a red fox in snowy woods.
December 19, 2025 at 1:07 AM
carrielaben.com
"My gaze stays on the body of Kris’s grandmother throughout dinner. My back is to the wall, and I can see her through the gap between Kris’s mother’s and father’s chairs."

#ghostadvent Night 11: I Wish You Died Laughing by @lioabendan.bsky.social

strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fi...
An oval leaf, green but with yellow fungus spots.
December 9, 2025 at 12:01 AM
carrielaben.com
"Not the devil, but a common enough trickster. Worthy of some degree of pity, Martelloni thinks, like all children at play."

#ghostadvent Night 8: The Retirement Home for Psychic Detectives by the ever-fascinating @horrorsong.blog

southwestreview.com/volume-110-n...
Urban roofscape with American crow.
December 6, 2025 at 3:13 AM
carrielaben.com
"'Robyn,' she said, 'You know I don't take sugar!'"

##ghostadvent Night 6: My Wife and My Dead Wife by @robynhitchcock.bsky.social

robynhitchcockofficial.bandcamp.com/track/my-wif...
My hand holding a glass of red wine, with nearly-matching purple nail polish.
December 3, 2025 at 10:57 PM
carrielaben.com
"Rats is bogies, I tell you, and bogies is rats; and don't you get to think anything else!"

www.online-literature.com/stoker/820/

#ghostadvent with rats for solstice
Cornell the black self rat and Cain the red-eyed marten rat standing on their hind legs in their cage, with the other rats and a well-chewed Bota box behind them.
December 21, 2024 at 11:47 PM
carrielaben.com
"Every bit of us was slow and quiet. We sat and waited, waited and watched. It wasn’t like the before times, when we hunted in the high hills..."

www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/wher...

#ghostadvent with @lectio.bsky.social
A metal crane statue and a chimney starter for a grill, shot from behind, looking out across a snow-covered lawn.
December 18, 2024 at 10:47 PM
carrielaben.com
"Taper candles stand shamelessly erect all over, fitted smoothly into their brass candelabras, washing the rooms in dreamy glows and plenty of shadows to grope in."

hexliterary.com?p=1083

#ghostadvent with @kcmeadbrewer.com
Pelican by Emmanuel Fremiet: a green glazed stoneware sculpture of a pelican-headed figure with a muscular humanoid body, bat wings, and frog-like feet.
December 3, 2024 at 9:20 PM
carrielaben.com
"If I drove up this five-hundred-foot driveway, I would have a difficult time turning around, should I have to leave the house in a hurry."

#ghostadvent Night 19: The Return by the one, the only, the legendary @joycecaroloates.bsky.social

harpers.org/archive/2023...
Looking up at a thick and mostly green pine tree against a very blue sky.
December 16, 2025 at 11:53 PM
carrielaben.com
"Meggie says, You think we have the budget for fake seagulls?"

#ghostadvent Night 14: I Can See Right Through You by @kellylink.bsky.social

www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/i-can-...
A mosaic of a magnolia blossom at the 28th street subway station.
December 11, 2025 at 10:21 PM
carrielaben.com
“So you believe, then? In ghosts?”

“I do. But they don’t believe in me. Can smell the desperation,”..."

#ghostadvent Night 7: Asking for It by Kristi Deemester (is she really not on here?)

www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/aski...
A garden bed at The Cloisters labeled Poison Plant above the birthwort. Other plants nearby include hound's tongue, horehound, and gromwell.
December 5, 2025 at 5:16 AM
carrielaben.com
"He was simply mortally weary of the narrow circumstances of his life. He had had twenty years of it--twenty years of garrets and roof-chambers and dingy flats and shabby lodgings..."

#ghostadvent Night 1: The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onions

web.english.upenn.edu/~nauerbac/on...
A small Cyclorrhaphan fly caught on the leaf of a sundew
November 29, 2025 at 2:06 AM
carrielaben.com
"Bex, crying, says she doesn’t love Ariana, but remember, anything Bex says is a lie."

www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/solv...

#ghostadvent featuring @mygeekblasphemy.bsky.social, who previously appeared in the 2020 Ghost Advent Calendar.
A hermit thrush killed by a window strike. I am holding up the wing to reveal the two-tone feathers underneath; there is a small smear of blood.
December 20, 2024 at 11:04 PM