Ghost stories from Australia

The Man Who Swallowed the Lantern

When I was a child, I lived in a small, isolated village in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, where the nights were so dark you could feel them pressing...

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The Drip in the Static

The Drip in the Static I moved to the outskirts of Reykjavik three months ago, into a converted fish-canning factory that now boasts ‘industrial-chic’ apartments. My girlfriend, Sigrid, loves the...

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The Circuit’s Lament

The house was an old Victorian on Bramblewood Lane, its bones creaking with every gust of wind. I was fourteen, staying with my grandparents while my mother worked abroad. The...

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The Third Crossing

The old man who ran the ferry across the Umber River had a reputation for silence, but not for lies. My grandmother, a woman who kept her feet firmly on...

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The Constant Iteration

The night air tasted of cut grass and cheap cider when my mate Callum pulled a worn, wooden box from under his bed. Inside, wrapped in a moth-eaten scarf, was...

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The Blue Vase of the Drowned Orchard

I never used to believe in anything beyond the visible world. Then my uncle Elias died, and the house on Grief Road began to change. I was twelve when he...

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The Man in the Static

I’ve always been a light sleeper, but ever since my partner, Alex, started working the night shift at the radio station, I’ve found myself waking at odd hours, usually between...

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The Weeping Wallpaper

The house on Maple Street had a history, but not the kind that shows up in public records. When I bought it, the realtor described it as ‘a fixer-upper with...

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The Rhythm of the Ticking Clock

Ever since I inherited my grandmother’s farmhouse in the dusty town of Red Hollow, I’d heard the locals mutter about its history. They spoke of a former owner, a watchmaker...

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The Canned Laughter

It started with small things, the kind of occurrences you could almost explain away. A door creaking open on its own, a cold spot in the hallway that lingered even...

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The Revolving Wardrobe

The old farmhouse on Hemlock Lane had always been a place of creaks and groans, but after my surgery, the sounds became something more. I was fourteen, recovering from a...

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The Last Switch

It had been a year since the old house on Cypress Lane had swallowed me whole, a year since the accident that left my parents rebuilding and me shipped off...

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The Mantel of Stolen Sleep

My husband, Elias, and I had been searching for a place to call our own for months. We finally found an old farmhouse on the edge of the Fenmoor, a...

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The Uninvited Listener

I always thought it was just the old house settling, that groaning in the walls at night, the way the floorboards breathed under my feet. I was twelve, then, and...

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The Missing Vinyl in the Coral House

Evelyn had been married to Arthur for nearly two years, but the shadow of her first husband, Gerald, still lingered in the corners of their sprawling beach house on the...

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The Rocking Chair’s Vigil

Last autumn, my mother and I visited the old McKinnon House, a preserved colonial mansion perched on a windswept bluff overlooking the gray Atlantic. The place was known for its...

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Our farmhouse, a sprawling, sagging structure of weathered oak and crooked chimneys, had stood for over a century, absorbing the laughter, tears, and secrets of five generations. The oldest section,...

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The Pale Visitor on Aldrich Lane

In the autumn of 1987, when I was six, my family moved to a creaking Victorian on Aldrich Lane, a dead-end road bordered by skeletal oaks. My room was at...

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The Lantern Man

I was three when we moved into the old quarantine cottages on the northern edge of the pine forest. My mother and stepfather had taken jobs at the sanatorium up...

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The Cinder-Filled Draft

The summer I turned twelve, my parents sent me to stay with my great-aunt Mabel in her crumbling Victorian house on the edge of the Ashfall Preserve. The preserve was...

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The Hollow Watch

When Lena and I first saw the converted munitions depot, the rent was suspiciously low. The realtor, a woman with a nervous tic, kept mentioning the history of the building:...

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The Porcelain Visitor

In the autumn of my ninth year, we lived in a sprawling Victorian house at the edge of a town that seemed to forget it existed. The house had an...

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The Quarryman’s Ledger

It began with a dream, but it was unlike any dream I had ever known. I was not asleep, or so it felt; I was a ghost in a world...

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The Clockwork Visitor

The house had never felt like mine, not truly. I’d bought it for the solitude, the way the pines crowded the windows and the wind carried the smell of damp...

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