Ghost stories from Australia

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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The Seventh Window

The late autumn of my thirtieth year found my wife, Elena, and me moving into a sprawling, derelict manor on the edge of the Fennwood Forest. The locals called it...

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The Dismantled Room

My childhood home sat on the edge of a town that had given up on itself, a Nebraska town where the grain elevator was the tallest thing for miles and...

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The Last Ferry

My grandmother always said that the dead linger where they left unfinished business, but I never thought that would include a ferry crossing in the middle of a rain-soaked night....

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The Index Finger

Lena’s thumbs hovered over the keyboard, the blue glow of her phone the only light in her tiny studio apartment. Her boyfriend, Marcus, had texted her at 6:47 AM, and...

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The Closet at the End of the Hall

It was the summer of 2016, and I was sixteen, staying with my aunt and uncle in their sprawling Victorian house in the countryside of upstate New York. My grandparents,...

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The Toenail Ticker

The clock on the nightstand read 7:15 AM, and I was still tangled in the last threads of a dream when the sound came: click-click-click, a rhythmic tapping like a...

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The Vellum Ledger

The old hospice of St. Jude’s stood on a hill overlooking the gray, churning sea, its brick face streaked with salt and sorrow. I was hired as the night archivist,...

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The Granite Chime

I recall the morning it began, the first of the off-season, when the fog rolled in thick from the sea, muffling the world in gray cotton. My husband, Elias, had...

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The Croak of December

I grew up in a house that seemed to hold its breath. It was a two-story brick structure, built in the mid-1950s, nestled in the outskirts of Adelaide, a city...

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The Constant Weight of Emptiness

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with the feeling of being watched by nothing. My family settled in the dusty outskirts of a town called Murrumbo,...

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The Weight of Cast-Off Things

The move was chaos. We were building a house, but the lease had a clause we’d skimmed over, and suddenly we had twenty days to vacate. The rental we found...

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The Unspent Hours

At sixteen, I moved into a place that smelled of other people’s lives, a basement flat in a crumbling Victorian that had been split into warrens of rented rooms. My...

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The Counterweight

The first week of October 2019, I was housesitting for my aunt in her old farmhouse outside of Crows’ Nest, Kansas. She’d been staying with my cousin in Topeka for...

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The Stoneman’s Reprieve

The night air in the city of Crayford was thick with the smell of rain and exhaust. I was admitted to St. Jude’s Hospital after a car accident left me...

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The Slippery Sign

It began on a sweltering Saturday at the massive home-improvement superstore, the kind that smells of sawdust and fresh paint. The parking lot was a sea of hot metal and...

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The Greenhouse Window

The old farmhouse sagged on its foundation like a tired animal, its bones creaking with every gust of wind off the plains. My family had inherited it from a distant...

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The Green Light in the Attic

I’m writing this not to scare anyone, but because I need help. Three months ago, my wife, her two sons, and I moved into a big, old farmhouse on the...

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The Cinder Man

My name is Elias, and I’m 32 now. This is a story from the old wharf district of Port Meridian, a place where the fog rolls in thick off the...

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The Missing Loafers

Living at the top of the old Jenkins Building, I had a routine: every morning, I’d slide on my scuffed loafers by the patio door in my small studio and...

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The Bargain in the Basement

Elena’s kidneys had been failing for years, a slow erosion that turned her from a vibrant architect into a ghost tethered to a dialysis machine. The specialists at St. Jude’s...

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The Quilt That Wouldn’t Stay

Marta had always been sensitive to the strange. Her old farmhouse, nestled in the misty valley of Blackwood, was a constant source of peculiar events. But the TV changing channels...

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The Ninth Setting

Marcus had always taken pride in his modern apartment—the sleek lines, the smart appliances, and above all, his new television. It was a marvel of technology, a 65-inch OLED with...

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