Ghost stories from Australia

The Painted Mourner

In the winter of 1998, my mother, Clara, and my grandmother, Edith, would drive every Tuesday to the Hillcrest Hospice, a low brick building on the outskirts of a town...

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The Marrow of the Ironwood

The old mining town of Greyhollow had been swallowed by the forest long before I was born, but the ironwood sanatorium still stood, a black tooth against the ridge. I’d...

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The Hollow in the Floor

The house on Marlowe Street had a smell my mother called ‘old cake,’ but I knew it was the scent of something forgotten. I was five, maybe younger, when we...

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The Radio in the Wall

The first thing I noticed about the house was the humming. It was a low, electrical buzz that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, like the house itself was...

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A Pattern in the Linen

The old farmhouse on Cedar Hollow Road had been in my family for generations, and I had never known any other home. Its walls had soaked up a century of...

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The Unlit Panel

I never believed in the superstitions that made builders skip the thirteenth floor. To me, it was just a quirk of architecture, a concession to fear. But after what happened...

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The Jumper in the Field

I was twelve that autumn, the year the crows started gathering in the pasture behind our house. My grandmother called them ‘the watchmen,’ but she never explained why. I had...

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The Wall That Breathed

My grandparents’ house in the Midwest had a strange symmetry: the front portion, built in 1903, with its oak-paneled dining room, the claw-foot tub, and the narrow hallway that always...

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The Basement of Whispers

I’m fourteen, and I’ve been carrying a secret that’s been scratching at my mind like a trapped rat. If I told anyone in my small town, they’d probably laugh or...

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The Hollow Gate

The summer I turned six, we moved to the edge of the bog—a place where the land itself seemed to hold its breath. Our cottage was old, with walls that...

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The Lantern in the Rain

I hadn’t planned to return to the Ashenport Lighthouse. After my first visit, I’d written a long, rambling post about the peeling paint and the way the fog seemed to...

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The Long Face in the Orchard

I first saw it when I was six, standing at the edge of the apple orchard behind our house. It was tall, impossibly tall, with a face stretched like pale...

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The Weight of Midnight

I was seventeen, and the world had become a cage of glass and silence. My brother, Leo, had been the only one who understood me, and when he drove his...

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The Red Door on Cedar Hill

The first thing I remember about the house on Cedar Hill was the color of the front door. It was painted a deep, arterial red, like the inside of a...

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The Clockwork Lantern

Five years ago, the office decided on a team-building excursion to the old mining town of Blackwood Falls. Our guide, a gaunt man named Mr. Thorne, led us through the...

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The Pale Visitor

In the autumn of 1987, I rented a room in a narrow, creaking house on Thornwood Lane, a forgotten cul-de-sac in the outskirts of a small, rain-soaked town. The house...

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The Lantern Vermin

I was fifteen when my cousin Mira and I took the lantern tour of the old penitentiary in our dusty, forgotten town of Ashenrock. The prison had loomed over the...

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The Salt of the Earth

The summer I turned twelve, my father and I were living in a converted barn on the edge of a place called Craven’s Hollow. It wasn’t a town, really, more...

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The Last Signal on Copperline Road

I am thirty-nine now, and I have never been one to spin tall tales. I work a steady job, pay my taxes, and keep my word. But what I am...

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The Radio’s Last Call

In the autumn of 1998, I was sixteen, a quiet kid who preferred the company of old books and the hum of a shortwave radio to the chaos of my...

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The Keyhole Tune

On the 14th of August, at 1:15 in the afternoon, I was home alone, a fact I had grown accustomed to since my husband, Daniel, had started his residency at...

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The Shed at the Perimeter

It’s been three weeks since we buried Bruno under the old oak at the edge of the property. I still find his hairs on my jacket, dark and coarse, clinging...

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The Weight of the Harbor Fog

The salt-crusted window of my attic room overlooked the boatyard, where skeletal masts swayed in the harbor breeze. At twelve, I’d grown used to the clang of rigging and the...

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The Linen Gap

The house on Wattle Street was a relic of another time, a towering wooden structure with wide verandas and a corrugated iron roof that sang when the rain came. It...

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