Ghost stories from Australia

The Last Bus from Murkwood

The rusted bus groaned as it pulled away from the terminal, its headlights cutting weak cones through the November fog. Elena pressed her forehead against the cold glass, watching the...

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The Hollow Service

The air had that peculiar weight before a storm, though the sky was clear and stained with the last orange of dusk. I remember it clearly because the dog, a...

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The Lantern’s Debt

The monsoon had been relentless for three days, turning the temple grounds of Wat Phra That into a quagmire of mud and fallen frangipani. I, Anong, had been tasked with...

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The Wraith of the Loom

The old textile mill outside of Lowell had been shuttered since the seventies, but the night watchman’s post remained. Marcus had taken the job out of desperation, not curiosity. The...

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The Felt Moth

The year was 2007, and I was staying in a rented cottage on the Isle of Pines, a remote Scottish island where the wind never fully ceased its moan. The...

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The Lanterns of Jalan Besar

The first time I noticed the wrongness was in the market. I was buying jackfruit for my mother, who was bedridden with a fever that had lasted three weeks. The...

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The Left Behind Bottles

In the autumn of 2014, I lived in a cramped two-bedroom flat on the outskirts of Bristol, near the old docks. The building was a converted warehouse, all exposed brick...

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The Rag Doll’s Lullaby

It was the summer I turned thirty-one, the summer I moved into my great-aunt’s dusty Victorian on the edge of a dying town called Hollow Creek. The house was a...

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The Counterweight

In the summer of ’87, my brothers and I were stirring up trouble in our grandmother’s old farmhouse, a place that creaked and groaned like an old ship. We were...

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The Clockmaker’s Legacy

My grandmother, Elara, was a clockmaker, and she left me her entire estate, including her old house in the rural town of Ashford Hollow. I had only visited her a...

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The Wainscot Room

I grew up in a creaking farmhouse on the edge of a town that the highway forgot. The place was wrapped in a sagging porch and crowned with a tin...

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The Red String Pact

It began, as these things often do, in the liminal space between sleep and waking. I live in a quiet town in the Australian outback, where the red dust stains...

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The Weight of the Floorboards

In the oldest part of our farmhouse, built from timber salvaged from a shipwreck over a century ago, my bedroom held a peculiar stillness. The walls had been plastered and...

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The Wardrobe’s Quiet

In the autumn of 1987, I was four years old, living in a small, damp cottage at the edge of a pine forest in northern Minnesota. My mother, a stern,...

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The Flesh Harp

The old textile mill had been silent for thirty years, its red brick walls crumbling, its windows like missing teeth. I came there to be alone, to escape the clamor...

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The Socket That Swallowed the Light

The first time my phone vanished, I blamed the clutter. My nightstand was a graveyard of half-read books, crumpled receipts, and a ceramic mug that had long ago surrendered its...

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The Last Keeper of Marrow Creek

The heat of late October clung to the red dirt as Mira and her partner, Callum, rolled into the tiny town of Marrow Creek, their van kicking up a veil...

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The Hollow Under the Stairs

The summer I turned eight, my brother Leo and I rode with our parents to collect Uncle Frank and his boys from their rental out on Cinder Lane. The house...

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The Weeping Buoy

The salt wind cut through our jackets as we stumbled along the crumbling harbor wall, the glow of our shared joint a tiny orange ember in the gloom. It was...

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The Weight of Two Minutes

Mara lived in a crumbling apartment complex on the edge of the city, where the streetlights buzzed with a sickly orange glow and the air always smelled of damp concrete....

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The Catalog of Unfinished Things

My mother, Eleanor, never spoke of the farm. Not the one where I grew up, but the one before, where she spent her childhood. Whenever I asked, her face would...

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The Cold Slab

When I took the archivist position at the old Verity Mills, I knew the building had a history. A sprawling red-brick textile factory from the 1920s, it had been converted...

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The Lawn Jockey’s Turn

Mara had always cherished Thursday evenings. While her parents and older brother, Cole, headed to the Rusty Spur, a local dive, for their weekly bluegrass jam, she had the house...

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The Dead Hand of the Ceiling Fan

The first time it happened, I thought it was a muscle spasm. That’s what the doctor would have said. But this wasn’t a twitch. It was a deliberate, forceful flick,...

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