Ghost stories from Australia

The Cobalt Room

The house on Marrow Lane had always been a place of quiet decay, but after Aunt Helen passed, it became a mausoleum of secrets. My cousins, Leo and Mara, and...

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The Weight of the Anchor

Our group had booked the ‘Extreme Night Tour’ at the old maritime quarantine hospital, now a heritage site perched on a cliff overlooking the churning sea. We arrived early, the...

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The Last Bus to Black Hollow

It was the first Sunday of October when the call came. The screen glowed with my cousin’s name, but it was his voice, raw and cracked, that cut through the...

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The Whistling Soil

The old farmhouse on Hemlock Lane had been in our family for generations, but it wasn’t until I turned thirteen that we moved in. My father, a man of quiet...

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The Quilt of Thistles

The apartment on Meridian Lane was a compromise, a place to heal after the divorce that had shattered the life I’d known for twenty years. I’d lived with my mother...

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The Man Who Forgot the Year

The first time I saw him, I thought the heat had finally cracked my skull. It was a sweltering February night in Adelaide, the kind where the air sits on...

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The Painted Lady of Wicker Hollow

I was six when we moved to Wicker Hollow, a crumbling farmhouse at the edge of a dying town. My mother had inherited it from a great-aunt she never spoke...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

February had always been a month of endings for me, but that year it promised a new beginning. I had just moved to the coastal town of Blackmere, a place...

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The Painted Walls

Cara had always been the cautious one, the one who checked the locks twice and read the fine print. So when her younger sister, Elara, announced she was moving into...

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The Last Ember of Oakhaven

My friend Lila and I were never close, but a shared interest in the unexplained brought us together. We’d meet at a diner that smelled of stale coffee and burnt...

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The Glass Ward

At thirteen, I discovered that the world is a thin veneer over something vast and patient. My grandmother, a stern woman with hands like twisted roots, was watching my younger...

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The Hollow Floor

When my younger sister, Elara, moved into the Monolith, a sprawling apartment complex on the edge of a rust-belt city, I thought the name was just a joke among tenants....

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The Bargain Under the Floorboards

Mara had always been sensitive to the moods of the old boarding house on Maple Street, but it wasn’t until her twenty-second birthday that she realized the house was sensitive...

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The Repeating Pattern

It was the summer I turned twelve that my family moved to the old farmhouse on Windermere Lane, a place where the fields stretched like gray oceans under a perpetually...

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The Basement of Unit 4B

The estate agent called it ‘vintage character.’ Rose called it a fire hazard waiting for a lawsuit. The building was a brutalist block of flats on the outskirts of Birmingham,...

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The Persistent Hum

The summer I turned fifteen, we moved into the fixer-upper on the edge of Blackwood, a house that had stood for barely two decades but had the soul of something...

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The Salted Threshold

I never believed in evil until I understood my grandmother’s hands. They were always dry, cracked like riverbeds, and they smelled of salt and old iron. As a child, I...

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The Salt Roads of Fenwick

I never believed in ghosts, not really. As a kid, I had my share of strange moments—a cold draft in a warm room, a flickering light—but I chalked them up...

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The Cartographer’s Intrusion

I’ve always been a lucid dreamer, but this was different. It wasn’t a dream. It was a conscious violation of my own bedroom, a place I thought was safe. My...

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The Constant Hum

It was the third week of my night shift at the automated bottling plant, and the fourteen-hour stints had begun to blur the edges of my days. My name is...

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The Glass Widow

I was only a year old when it happened, so I have no memory of it myself. All I know is what my mother, Elena, and my eldest sister, Clara,...

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The Knife’s Repetition

I had gotten used to silence. After years of living with my parents, where every creak and murmur was a chorus of familiar noises, my own apartment was a monument...

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The Coin Collector

Three weeks after the harvest festival, on the last night of the season, we found the old schoolhouse at the edge of the orchard. It was a tourist trap, but...

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The Last Sunbeam

The summer I turned sixteen, my parents left me alone for a fortnight while they attended a distant cousin’s funeral in another state. Our farmhouse in the rural Midwest, with...

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