Submissions Closed!

The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award competition is now closed to submissions. Response was fantastic, with story entries pouring in from around the world. Thanks to everyone who participated. We’ll be announcing (and publishing) our winner and two honorable mentions on October 31. Visit our contest page for information about the next Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award competition.

This terrific anthology published in Durham, England contains an entire section of haikus related to ghosts and the supernatural by The Ghost Story’s editor, Paul Guernsey, and many other poets with an interest in the uncanny. Have a look.

Midsummer Means It’s Time To Announce And Publish The Winning Stories In The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award Contest. Happy Reading!

The international scope of The Ghost Story contest continues to expand. This time around, not only did we receive submissions from eight countries, but our Honorable Mention story is by an Australian writer, and one of our two Second Honorable Mention pieces comes to us from Finland.

There were also more submissions than ever before, and the high quality of so many of them made judging the contest a difficult task. In fact, we wound up with two Second Honorable Mentions not because we planned it that way, but because we loved them both, and in the end, despite the added expense of the extra prize money, we just could not bear to choose between them.

What is especially fascinating about the four stories we’re publishing here is the each one takes a completely different approach to the supernatural, and each uses the otherworldly for a different literary purpose. For instance, our overall winner—and recipient of the competition’s $1,000 cash award—presents us with a protagonist who is haunted by the traumas of his childhood as well as by the ghost of jazz musician Louis Armstrong, who serves as his own personal spirit guide. Our Honorable Mention story gives us a new mother whose fears for her baby’s safety coalesce into the physical form of a pair of strange children who appear on her doorstep in the middle of the night. One of our Second Honorable Mentions speculates about the problems, romantic and otherwise, that might be faced by someone who was born as a ghost, rather than having had to die to get that way, and our other Second Honorable Mention offers a harrowing situation—a mentally unbalanced teenager armed with a butcher knife—that is nonetheless so funny that we find ourselves laughing out loud every time we read it.

Come on inside to help us celebrate our winners, and to enjoy a chilling summertime read.

And if you’re planning to submit a supernatural story to the next Ghost Story contest, we’ll start accepting entries again at the beginning of August—and we’re looking forward to reading yours!

Finally, if you’d like to leave a comment, or to discuss our stories or the contest in general, please visit our Facebook page.

Writers From The United Kingdom Won All Three Prizes In The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition

Writers in Britain obviously have a knack for the supernatural. In The Ghost Story‘s new Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition, which concluded January 31, all three cash awards for flash fiction (short-short stories of under 1,000 words) on a supernatural or magic realism theme went to authors living in England and Scotland.

Scroll down through TGS‘s Home Page to read these three fine stories.

Winning honors in the competition—and its $300 first prize—went to CL Dalkin, a librarian living on the south coast of England, for her story, “A Brief Respite.”

First Honorable Mention and a $100 cash award went to Barry Charman, of North London, for his story, “Palette.”

And Second Honorable Mention, with a $50 prize, was taken by Stuart Riding of Edinburgh, Scotland, for “Kitsune.”

Our next fiction contest is The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award, for which we begin accepting submissions on February 15. Prizes are $1,000, $250, and $100 for full-length short stories of between 1.500 and 10,000 words.

It’s Finally Halloween—And Time To Publish The Top Stories In The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award Contest. Happy Reading!

Stories poured in from the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom. The winning pieces—one that’s at once bittersweet and spooky, three others that are entirely unnerving—are set in wartime Japan, in rural Scotland, in suburban America, and in the dark hill country of the American South.

And the winning writers are as varied as their work: A well-known author who has won many prestigious awards, a 29-year-old from the West Coast who never previously published a word and is now publishing two stories here, and an Australian native now living in, and inspired by, Scotland.

Come on in and have a read—but be warned: Afterward, you may feel like sleeping with the lights on for a while.