Ghost stories from Australia

The Fabric of Stillness

The old textile mill had been converted into lofts years ago, but the machinery’s ghost still seemed to hum in the walls. Lena had moved in three months prior, drawn...

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The Chilling Hollow

I never believed in ghosts until I moved into the old farmhouse on Hollow Creek Road. It was a fixer-upper, but the price was too good to pass up, and...

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The Man in the Silver Suit

I’m not asking for your understanding; I’m only asking that you listen before you judge. I’m fifteen now, but two years ago, when I was thirteen, my family moved into...

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The Unquiet Soil of Kestrel Hollow

Two years after I thought I had left ghost hunting behind, I found myself in the ochre dust of Kestrel Hollow, a dying sheep station in the Australian outback. My...

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The Cartographer’s Last Entry

The old lighthouse at Cape Morrow had been silent for decades, its lamp long since gutted and its iron galleries rusted into skeletal fingers. I moved there in the autumn...

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The Glass Garden

I never believed in ghosts until I moved into my grandmother’s old greenhouse. It wasn’t a house, but a massive Victorian glass structure that had been in our family for...

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The Night Splicer

My name is Elias Crane, and I’ve lived alone in a refurbished fire lookout tower in the high desert of Nevada for the past five years. The nearest town is...

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The Static Bloom

The old farmhouse groaned around Elara like a dying beast. Wind, a perpetual guest in these parts, rattled the windowpanes of her isolated bedroom, a sound she usually found comforting....

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The Pipe Organ’s Lullaby

It was the summer of 2008 when I lived above the old Grandview Emporium, a crumbling three-story building on the edge of downtown Millbrook. Below us was a dusty antique...

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The Grove of Unfinished Work

The Oakridge Preparatory Academy sat atop a hill that overlooked a dense, sprawling forest known as the Thornwood. Before it became a school for the sons of the wealthy, it...

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The Last Harvest

The red clay of Havenbrook had a way of clinging to everything—shoes, hems, even memories. I was born in the middle of a thunderstorm that cracked the sky open, after...

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The Second Rung

I’m turning nineteen next week, but I want you to know that my age doesn’t make my experience any less real. I’ve always been a rational person. Even as a...

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The Pale Boy at the Rain-Slicked Window

In the autumn of that year, I was living in a creaking old farmhouse on the outskirts of a fog-choked town in the Pacific Northwest. The house had a reputation...

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The Static Between Songs

Lila had always prided herself on her skepticism. Growing up in the dusty town of Morrow, where the heat shimmered off the asphalt and the only mysteries were which crops...

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The Bloom of the Unseen

The air in the old Blackwood Manor tasted like dust and forgotten things. For years, my family had dragged me on these compulsory weekend retreats, ostensibly for ‘bonding’ but always...

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The Hollow on Brandywine Hill

The house on Brandywine Hill was a relic of a forgotten century, its gingerbread trim and spindlework porch a skeletal grin against the Pennsylvania sky. Built in 1892 by a...

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The Ceramic Hum

I was settled into the old armchair by the window, a weathered copy of a maritime history in my lap, when the silence of the house was shattered by a...

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The Granite Ledger

My life had been a quiet stretch of ordinary days until the first week of February, when Lena, my oldest friend, announced she was getting married. She’d been proposed to...

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The Dog on the Landing

I’m Maya, and I’m fourteen. For the past three years, my house has been a doorway for things that shouldn’t exist. It started when I was eleven, in the old...

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The Breathing in Room 14

In the summer of 2009, I was twelve, staying with my cousin Mia in the small mountain town of Pineshadow. Her family ran a modest bed-and-breakfast called the Sleepy Fox,...

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The Clockwork Tree

The night air had a quality I can only describe as ‘wrong’. It was the summer of 2003, and I was housesitting for my aunt in her old Victorian home...

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The Gorse Man

The summer I turned twelve, we moved to a place called Holloway Fen, a low, damp valley that smelled of peat and rotting reeds. Our cottage was a squat, brick...

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The Sepia Photograph

I have never believed in the supernatural. To me, the world is a place of cold logic, cause and effect, and the occasional malfunctioning light bulb. I live in Millbrook,...

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The Third Shelf

I was halfway through a late-night documentary about deep-sea trenches when the hairs on my arms stood up. It wasn’t the cold; the apartment’s ancient radiator wheezed out uneven heat....

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