Ghost stories from Australia

The Lantern That Refused to Die

Marta was fourteen when her family moved into the old Barlow house on Cedar Lane. The place had a sagging porch and peeling paint, and the smell of dampness clung...

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The Static Man

The 9:15 to Harrowgate was always a sardine can. I pressed my forehead against the cold window, watching the rain streak the glass into rivulets that looked like veins. Beside...

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The Weight of February

The house on Juniper Lane came with a cracked foundation and a yard overrun with wild mint that smelled sweet and rotten all at once. Mia knew something was wrong...

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The Humming Wire

My name is Elara, and I am the eldest of five, the only girl among four brothers. We moved from the coastal clamor of Cairns to a sleepy, inland town...

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The Janitor’s Cadence

In 1994, I was twenty-two, a restless art school dropout who’d traded paintbrushes for a mop at a private girls’ academy in the leafy hills of Wellington, New Zealand. The...

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The Painted Fingers

Maya had always been attuned to the quiet hum of the world, a sensitivity that made her notice the way the old library carpet smelled of dust and secrets, or...

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The Salt-Crusted Communion

I’ve lived in the coastal town of Port Ember for most of my adult life, a place where the ocean’s breath mixes with the scent of pine and old wood....

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The Drain Line

My childhood home sat at the end of a long, gravel lane in the rural outskirts of a town that no longer appears on most maps. The house was a...

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The Banister Watcher

I’ve been house-sitting for my aunt in her old Victorian on the edge of town for three weeks, and the first two were as quiet as a tomb. The place...

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The Mapmaker’s Ledger

My aunt, Clara, never spoke of the house on Copperfield Row unless pressed, and even then, she’d wave a hand as if shooing a fly. It was only last autumn,...

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The Glass Meridian

In the summer of 2014, I inherited a house that had been in my family for three generations. It stood on a windswept bluff above the town of Saltmarsh, overlooking...

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The Hollow Behind the Hill

The house at 13 Raven’s Crest wasn’t old—only fifteen years, which in the language of architecture is a toddler. My mother, an architect with a penchant for symmetry and light,...

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The Clockmaker’s Gift

I never believed in ghosts, not really. My grandmother used to tell me stories about the old country, about spirits that lingered in the corners of houses, but I dismissed...

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The Night Clerk’s Compensation

The Granite Pines Motor Lodge was the kind of place that advertised ‘modern amenities’ but whose reality was a flickering neon sign and a lobby smelling of stale coffee and...

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The Lantern in the Crawlspace

I never slept well in that house, not that I ever mentioned it to anyone. It wasn’t the creaks or the drafts; it was the feeling that something was watching...

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The Constant Companion

For months, the Grant house had felt… off. Not hostile, but watchful. It was in the way the floorboards sighed underfoot, even when no one moved, and how the air...

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The Fern Hollow Directive

I was never one to believe in things that creep past the edge of reason. At twenty-two, I had a degree in ecology and a job mapping invasive species in...

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The Crimson Shift

In the winter of 2003, I was a barista at ‘The Grindstone,’ a coffee shop nestled in the historic district of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The city was blanketed in snow,...

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The Hollow Stride

Julian had always been a creature of the dark hours. Where others feared the deep night, he found a strange comfort in its velvet silence. His small cottage, nestled at...

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The Hanging Man of Karrinyup

I turned fifteen in the middle of a heatwave that made the air shimmer over the asphalt like a mirage. My family had just moved to Karrinyup, a sleepy northern...

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The Scent of Rain on Sunday

The year was 1986, and I was temporarily lodged in Weatherby, a small town in the English Midlands, waiting for a house purchase to go through. My flat was on...

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The Empty Chair

In the autumn of 2012, I was twenty years old, living in a cramped attic apartment in the old mill town of Ashford. The building had been a textile factory...

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The Inheritance of Echoes

The morning of the harvest festival, I found my grandmother’s locket in the attic, tangled in a forgotten shawl. It was warm to the touch, as if it had been...

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The Missing Chain

On Halloween night, my friends and I decided to go all out with our costumes. We were at my buddy Marcus’s place, a run-down farmhouse at the edge of town,...

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