Ghost stories from Australia

The Leaking Window

When I was nine, the house on Cypress Lane taught me that the dead don’t always stay dead. I’d lie in bed, watching the rain streak down the window like...

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The Cradle of Hushed Hours

The old house in Dunedin leaned against the hillside like a tired grandmother, its gingerbread trim peeling and its windows like rheumy eyes. We moved in when I was six...

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The Glass Marble Pact

We had spent the entire summer collecting strange artifacts from flea markets and abandoned lots, but the planchette we found in a rusted tin box under the porch of a...

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The Weeping Wallpaper

The house on Maple Street had always felt wrong to me, but I could never explain why. It was a Victorian-era twin house in a quiet Philadelphia suburb, renovated before...

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The Salted Threshold

I’ve always had the knack for noticing things that shouldn’t be there. The flicker of a light in a dead bulb, the cold spot in a warm room, the feeling...

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The Static in the Hallway

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a house at 3 a.m. It is not the normal quiet of sleep, but a thick, waiting stillness that makes...

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The Crying in the Woods

I was eleven when my best friend Maya turned twelve, and her parents let her have a three-day sleepover at their new house on the edge of Crescent Lake. The...

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The Static That Swallowed Hope

The farmhouse on the edge of the marsh had been in my father’s family for generations, but we’d only moved in that autumn, fleeing the city’s noise. My sister, Elara,...

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The Constant in the Static

The old house on Balsam Lane had a way of reminding you of things you’d rather forget. I moved there after my grandmother passed, hoping the quiet would help me...

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The Renter’s Lament

The house on Mulberry Lane sagged like a weary old sailor, its timber bones groaning under the weight of decades. We were only renters, marking time while Dad found his...

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The Pale Visitor

I’m sharing this in the hopes that others who’ve felt the same icy presence in the dark will know they’re not alone—and maybe someone out there has answers. It started...

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The Cartographer’s Third Landing

I’ve always prided myself on being a rational man. Numbers, maps, data—those were my languages. As a land surveyor for a provincial government, I spent my days measuring boundaries and...

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The Hourglass Window

My childhood home sat at the edge of a sprawling, forgotten forest, where the trees grew so dense that sunlight barely touched the ground. I never paid much attention to...

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The Fourth Lantern

In the autumn of 1987, I was seventeen, and the world was a place of endless possibility and unnamed dread. My older brother, Cal, and our friend, Dez, had convinced...

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The Static in the Walls

The motel room smelled of bleach and regret, a chemical mask over decades of decay. I’d checked in late, the clerk a skeletal man with a twitch, his eyes never...

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The Lantern in the Hollow

It was the last night of December, the kind of cold that bites through denim and settles in your bones. I was with my two friends, Dex and Mara, sitting...

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The Concrete Loop

I never placed much stock in the tales of restless spirits or lingering energies, not until the autumn of 2018, when my eleven-year-old daughter, Elara, began to change. We lived...

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The Staircase of Unraveling

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. The dead were dead, and the living had enough problems. But that was before my mother’s old house on Bramblewick Lane came back...

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The Silversmith’s Bargain

Mara had never believed in the supernatural. To her, every creak in the old mill had a cause—a settling floorboard, a draft through a broken pane. She was an artist,...

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The Last Sparrow

The old house on Birchwood Lane had always felt like a character in our family’s story. I’d grown up in its creaking halls, its drafty rooms, and the peculiar way...

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The Latch of the Weeping Field

My name is Elara, and I have seen things that should not exist since I was a child. The first encounter I can truly claim as mine happened not in...

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The Gravity of Sleep

In the autumn of 2014, I was housesitting for my cousin in a remote farmhouse in the Welsh hills. The nearest village was six miles away, and the only sounds...

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The Glass Casket

I was eleven when my grandmother’s Siamese cat, Juniper, died. She was only three, and the vet said it was a sudden heart defect, something she was born with. I...

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The Lamplight Visitor

In the cramped attic of our rented row house on Birchwood Lane, I learned that childhood fears do not vanish with age; they merely change their shape. The house itself...

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