Night Time Story: The Postcard From a Ghost Town

On her twelfth birthday, Sadie received a strange postcard in the mail. The picture showed a bustling mining town nestled in mountains, with the words “Greetings from Silver Creek” printed in faded letters. The message on the back was brief: “Miss you. Come visit soon. –G”

The postmark was dated last week, but Sadie’s grandmother told her something impossible: “Silver Creek hasn’t existed for nearly seventy years. It was abandoned after the mines closed.”

Intrigued, Sadie searched online and found only brief mentions of Silver Creek as a ghost town, with ruins somewhere in the nearby mountains.

The postcard writer—G—had addressed Sadie specifically, yet she knew no one with that initial.

When a second postcard arrived a week later (“The festival is coming. You should see the decorations.”), Sadie convinced her parents to take a weekend trip to find the ruins.

The hiking trail to Silver Creek was overgrown, but as they rounded a bend, Sadie gasped.

Stone foundations, collapsed wooden structures, and an old water tower marked where the town once stood. Though clearly abandoned for decades, the place didn’t feel empty.

As Sadie explored, she found a half-buried sign for “Grayson’s General Store.” The name triggered recognition—her great-grandfather was named George Grayson.

According to family stories, he’d run a store before moving to the city during the Great Depression.

In what remained of the store, Sadie discovered a small, tarnished mailbox.

Inside was a stack of yellowed postcards—all identical to the ones she’d received, but never sent. Next to them lay a journal explaining everything.

Her great-grandfather had written the postcards to his daughter—Sadie’s grandmother—before the town’s evacuation was announced.

He’d never mailed them after the family’s hasty departure. His final entry expressed regret that his child would never see Silver Creek’s summer festival again or remember the town that had been their home.

Somehow, seventy years later, the postcards had found their way to Sadie, born on the same date as her grandmother.

Back home, Sadie showed everything to her grandmother, who cried as memories flooded back of a childhood she’d been too young to remember clearly.

Together, they created a scrapbook about Silver Creek, preserving the story of the forgotten town and the store owner who had wanted so badly for his family to remember their first home.

The postcards stopped coming after Sadie’s visit, but sometimes she would look at the originals and feel a connection to the great-grandfather she’d never met—and to the ghost town that, for a brief moment, had reached across time to be remembered once more.

By Dustin Memories