Ghost stories from Australia

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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The Weight of the Upper Floor

I never told anyone about the tapping at first. It was a small thing, a young thing, like a stone skipping across the floor of the attic above my bedroom....

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The Carpet’s Hunger

It was the summer I turned twelve, and my father had brought home a stack of old videotapes from a garage sale. Among them was a film he insisted was...

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The Broken Locket

The house on Hemlock Lane was ordinary in every way, a two-story colonial with peeling white paint and a porch that sagged slightly on the left side. We moved there...

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The Gardener’s Shade

In the autumn of 2014, my wife Clara was admitted to St. Jude’s Hospital for a routine procedure that turned out to be anything but routine. She had developed a...

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The Inventory of Unfinished Rooms

My brother Marcus had been carrying something with him for years, something only he could see. After our mother passed, he started talking about a woman in a floral dress...

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The Quivering Basket

On a cool autumn evening in the small town of Ravensbrook, the Larsson family sat down to dinner. The dining room was lit by a single overhead bulb that cast...

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The Morning They Came Down

I’ve carried a hundred stories in my head, each one a splinter I kept picking at but never pulled out, because sharing them would mean reliving them. But what happened...

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The Threshold of the Lower Room

Mara and I had been living in the ancestral farmhouse for three years. It was a sprawling, drafty Victorian that had been in his family since the 1880s, and it...

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The Gift of the Hollow Hills

I was eleven that winter, small for my age, and the world still smelled of coal smoke and pine needles. My brothers, Marcus and Eddie, were giants to me, five...

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The Static in the Walls

Mara had always found comfort in the strange. She collected antique radios, their dials and vacuum tubes a fascination, and she’d never once felt unsettled by the whispers of static...

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The Melon’s Stone

The first time I noticed the misshapen watermelon in the cellar, I thought it was just a shriveled remnant from last summer, forgotten and gone soft. But then, as I...

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The Dry Hollow

The summer I turned six, we moved to a place called the Dry Hollow. It wasn’t a name on any map, just what the locals called the stretch of land...

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The Piping on the Twelfth Floor

It had been two years since I last posted anything, and I was grateful for the quiet. Nothing had happened to us, not really. But then came the trip to...

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The Hollow Postures

In the autumn of 2014, my partner Marcus and I began taking weekly riding lessons in the rural outskirts of a town called Millbrook, about a two-hour drive from our...

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The Empty Birdcage

The old farmhouse in the Mississippi Delta had been in my boyfriend’s family for generations. When I moved in with him at nineteen, I thought the peeling paint and creaking...

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The Salt-Stained Map

I never believed in ghosts. I was a man of the sea, a carpenter who trusted wood, nails, and the cold certainty of the tide. My name is Elias Thorne,...

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The Copper Wire Communion

In the sweltering February of 2004, I managed a crew of forty line technicians for a regional telecom provider in the dusty outskirts of Alice Springs. Our job was to...

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The Chattering of the Dry Creek

The drive from Sydney had been a crawl through grey drizzle, and the warnings about black ice on the Bells Line of Road had turned our cheerful weekend trip into...

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The Man Who Ran Through Gardens

The first time I saw the photographs, I was nine years old, standing on a chair in my grandmother’s attic. The box was labeled ‘Estate’ in my mother’s cramped handwriting,...

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The Crate of Hollow Bells

It was the week between Christmas and New Year’s, 2015, when I drove up to my father’s new place in the high desert. He and my stepmother, a woman who...

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The Chromatic Pulse

In the late summer of 1974, my mother, Clara, was eight years old, and we were renting a farmhouse on the outskirts of a town called Millbrook. The owners were...

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The Porch Light Pact

The house on Birch Street had been a haven for Marie since 1995. A red-brick terrace in the heart of a city that had forgotten its industrial past, it hummed...

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The Ephemeral Visitor

The afternoon sun filtered through the venetian blinds of my apartment on Maple Street, casting lazy stripes of light across the linoleum floor. I was rinsing a plate when the...

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