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Ghost Apples

October 27, 2025·27 min·2 clips

Lori bites a ghost apple, and its icy shards cut her mouth, turning it red with blood.

The narrator opens by recalling his childhood friend Lori, a smart city girl who came to stay with her country cousins each summer. His first clear memory of her is a winter scene: she bites into a ghost apple — a hollow ice shell left behind when a rotting apple falls away — and the shards cut her mouth, filling the broken half with her blood. The story traces a slow romantic arc: the narrator's dismissal of Lori as a kid, his sudden shyness at twelve, his deliberate cruelty the first time something happened between them, her five-year silence. They reconnect when both work at an apple farm, and after his clumsy apology she gradually warms to him. She moves in one December. The narrator describes their relationship as intense and frightening — she became something different when held, more needy and potent than he could manage. He kept urging her to go back to school; she kept asking if he wanted her to leave. He knew she was better than the place and better than him, but he kept her. He was never faithful. When Lori calls to read him a message from another woman — Ashley, who works at the yard — the narrator drives home in a sudden whiteout to find the front door open and Lori gone into the storm. Her car is still there. The police cannot respond in the blizzard. He wades into the dark woods calling her name with a rope tied to a tree, then goes home and waits and drinks. He knows by midnight she is dead. The police question him, find nothing, and conclude she went for a walk and was caught by the sudden whiteout. People speculate. After the inquiry, the narrator begins seeing Lori in the freezing rain — not Lori but the ghost apple of her, a cold hollow ice outline, shining in the floodlights. She appears at his windows each time it freezes, and he hides in closets listening for footsteps, sobbing when her presence fades. Aaron breaks his ribs at a bar. The narrator continues sleeping with Ashley, including one night with Lori standing silent at the window the whole time. Ashley, the next morning, tells him to leave. He does: moves south, works at a mill, gets married, raises children. Ten years later his wife tells him he has never let her in — that he is frozen — and leaves. He comes back home. Fifteen years after Lori's death, he reconnects with Aaron, who has forgiven him, and buys back his renovated old house. On the first night there, a whiteout comes and the freezing rain follows. He opens the door and invites the ghost inside. She wanders the changed house in silence, sits at the end of the mattress as he once had. He apologizes. She leans into him and slowly melts away to nothing. The story closes with the narrator planning to walk to the apple orchard and find a ghost apple to save in the icebox so it never melts.

As heard by us

A winter ghost story that lets ordinary details turn mean.

Wrong Station turns a childhood summer memory into a winter haunting, and it keeps the pressure on by letting grief and suspicion gather around a single vanished girl.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a ghost story about a summer visit, a whiteout, and what follows after.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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