Ghost stories from Australia

The Silent Portrait in the Parlor

I first met my wife, Clara, in the spring of 2015, and we were married a year later. But before we tied the knot, she insisted I meet her grandfather,...

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The Pattern in the Frost

The apartment on Hemlock Street had one feature that sold it to me: a bathroom window that faced the dense, untamed woods behind the building. The glass was that old,...

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The Vertical Woman

I remember that New Year’s Eve at my cousin’s farmhouse, the one buried in the pine woods where the cell signal died and the only sound was the wind scraping...

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The Visitor at the Threshold

The granite hills of the Pilbara held a heat that lingered even in the cool of the night, seeping through the thin walls of our rented cottage. We’d been there...

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The Hanged Garden

My name is Elias, and for most of my life I’ve kept a secret that has weighed on me like a shroud. I was never one to chase the supernatural—not...

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The Persistent Stain

The night air had a metallic tang, like old copper coins, as Lena and her friend Marcus stepped off the nearly empty tram. The platform was a concrete slab carved...

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The Unseen Tenant

My name is Mira, and I’m sixteen. I’ve lived in this old farmhouse on the edge of the oak woods my whole life, and I thought I knew every creak...

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The Hollow Between Heartbeats

In the winter of that year, I had taken a room in an old boarding house on the edge of a town that no one spoke of unless they had...

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The Man Who Hated the Hum

My grandmother’s house sat at the end of a gravel road in the foothills of the Appalachians, a place called Cold Springs Hollow. The house itself was a weathered farmhouse...

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The Hour of the Oak

My name is Elara, and I’m sixteen. I’ve lived my whole life in this little town, nestled at the edge of a forest that feels older than anything. My bedroom...

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The Frizzy-Haired Child at the Moonlit Waterhole

It was the dry season of 1987 when my family made the long journey to our ancestral lands in the heart of the desert. I was nine, the eldest of...

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The Glass-Eyed Saint

My earliest clear memory is the smell of damp plaster and the groan of settling timber. We moved into the old Maren House when I was four, my sister Elara...

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The Hollow in the Hill

Our house squatted in the crook of a gray ridge, hemmed by pines that creaked like old bones. You reached it by a dirt track that switchbacked through stands of...

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The Constant in the Hallway

Elena had finally found a semblance of peace. After months of sleepless nights in her cramped city apartment, she had moved back into her late parents’ house in the countryside,...

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The Fiat’s Last Song

My cousin Marco wasn’t really my cousin; he was my mother’s sister’s son, but we’d grown up like siblings. When his wife, Lena, walked out, he crumbled. He’d always been...

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The Constant at 2:47

Mara’s nights in her rented bungalow in Geraldton, a coastal town north of Perth, were usually lulled by the distant crash of waves. But three months ago, the rhythm broke....

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The Gravity of the Guest

Three months ago, my partner, Aaron, mentioned that his mother, Linda, was struggling to pay the mortgage on her house in the quiet town of Ashford. To make ends meet,...

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The Lanterns of Morrow Flats

The night had the kind of stillness that makes you hear your own heartbeat. Ella and I were driving back from a forgotten music festival somewhere in the Mojave, the...

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The Blue Apron

It was a damp Thursday afternoon in the coastal town of Dunmore, and the salt air had crept into every corner of the small cottage that Liam now called home....

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The Stain That Wouldn’t Dry

It was a Wednesday in late autumn when I brought the rust-colored sedan home from a dealer in the outskirts of Adelaide. The car was a 2008 Holden Commodore, and...

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The Bottle That Moved

I was fifteen, and my friend Marcus and I were left alone for the weekend. My parents had gone to a wedding, and we had the house to ourselves. We...

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The Saffron Lantern

I was twelve the summer we moved into the old farmhouse on Redmire Lane, a place my mother inherited from a great-aunt she barely remembered. The house sat at the...

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The Mulga Man

The wet season in the Kimberley is a pressure cooker. The air hangs thick and heavy, and the cicadas scream like they’re being tortured. My family had just moved to...

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The Last Delivery

At the edge of the lumber town of Pine Hollow, where the forest pressed close like a held breath, stood the workshop of my grandfather, Elias Vane. I, Calla, was...

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