Ghost stories from Australia

The Fabric of Longing

For years, a weight has settled on my chest at the oddest hours, not heavy but hollow, like a room emptied of its furniture. It started in the autumn I...

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The Ghosts of Hangar 4

The invitation came from an old college buddy, Marcus, who had inherited his family’s farmland along the Merrimack River. The land had been a training airfield during World War II,...

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The Floor Above the Landing

The coastal town of Marrow’s Reach wasn’t what I’d call a holiday destination. It was a place of grey skies, salt-bitten wood, and a particular smell of low tide that...

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The Salt Trail

I was nine, not eight, when the first thing happened, and it wasn’t in Australia but in the damp, pine-scented outskirts of a small town in the Pacific Northwest. My...

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The Crouching Figure

My grandmother’s farmhouse had always felt like it was holding its breath. It wasn’t just the creaks and groans of an old structure settling; it was a constant, prickling awareness...

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The Room Beneath the Stairs

I have lived in this house since the day I was born, and now at seventeen, I am convinced it is not just old, but aware. Our home, a sprawling...

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The Shelf of Tiny Jars

When we first arrived in the dusty town of Pinnacle Flats, I thought the house was a joke. A crooked two-story Victorian with a peeling white facade, it leaned like...

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The Meat Tenderizer

The day the Harlow family moved into the converted warehouse on Grist Mill Lane, the air inside smelled like rust and old sawdust. Callum, the father, had bought the place...

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The Iron Taste of Soil

The day I decided to hold the séance was overcast, the kind of gray that presses against your skin. The kids were at school, and I’d driven the hour to...

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The Dry Well

It started with a joke, the kind you tell at a sleepover when you’re too old to believe in ghosts but too young to admit you’re scared. My friend Maya...

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The Cold January Lake

I remember the fireworks on the old television, the colors smearing across the screen as the countdown hit zero. We were in Cedar Lake, a town that seemed to exist...

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The Cedar Lake Grid

For five years, I have tried to write about the night we found Clara Voss. Each attempt ends the same way: with my hands hovering over the keyboard, unwilling to...

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The Coin and the Oak Door

The summer I turned fifteen, we left my grandmother’s cramped apartment in the city and moved into a house that smelled of fresh paint and sawdust. It sat at the...

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The Last Sketch in the Root Cellar

I started seeing things when I was eleven, but the first thing I saw was not a ghost. It was a sketch. I was an artist even then, filling the...

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The Drowned Grove

The house stood at the edge of the wetlands, a low, sprawling structure of dark timber and moss-covered stone, built in the late ’80s by a family that had a...

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The Breath Test

Eleanor had spent fifteen years in the sterile corridors of St. Jude’s Memorial, a hospital that had seen more than its share of the inexplicable. She was a pragmatist, a...

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The Carousel of Static

It was the summer before I turned fifteen, and I’d convinced my parents to let me have my friend Mara sleep over at my aunt’s place in the countryside. You...

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The Stillness at Low Tide

It was our annual December pilgrimage to the salt-flat campsite near the old lighthouse, a place where the wind never truly stopped and the sea whispered against the rocks like...

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The Light That Waits

The summer I turned five, my parents carted my sister and me off to a crumbling farmhouse owned by their old college friend, Margaret. It was a place of dusty...

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The Cartographer of Silence

It was the summer I turned five, and the house on Birchwood Lane had a way of holding its breath. My parents called it a fixer-upper, but I knew better—it...

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The Porcelain Visitor

I have always been a skeptic at heart. A firm believer in logic, in the cold and in the tangible. But our family moved into an old farmhouse in the...

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The Cloth-Faced Marionettes

In the autumn of 1985, our family moved into a sprawling Victorian house on the edge of a small town. The house had a peculiar history, but my six-year-old mind...

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The Salt-Stained Floorboards

The house on Merrow Lane had stood since before the town’s pier was built, its weather-beaten timber and salt-stained floorboards bearing witness to a century of tides. I’d moved there...

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The Grinning Kettle

The bay had been flat calm all morning, a sheet of dark glass under a sky the color of old pewter. Elias and his best friend of thirty years, Cormac,...

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