Ghost stories from Australia

The Tally Marks in the Boiler Room

It began with the house on Meridian Street, a sprawling Victorian that my parents bought for a song after the previous owners fled in the night. I was eleven, my...

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The Postcard That Came Back

When I was nine, my father was a photograph on the mantle, a voice on a crackling phone line, and a promise that always arrived with a bakery cake on...

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The Unfinished Chess Game

The guest room at Marcus’s house was a dim, dusty rectangle that smelled of old paper and mothballs. I had come to help him organize his late father’s library, a...

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The Brass Figurine’s Vigil

I’d come down to the coastal city of Merrowport to visit an old university mate, Elara, who shared a sprawling, turn-of-the-century flat above a shuttered fish cannery. The building itself...

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The Lady of the Aisle

I never thought much about the ghost in the grocery store. After all, I’d grown up seeing them—thin, wispy things that flickered at the edges of my vision, or solid...

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The Hollow Floorboard

My childhood was a patchwork of dark rooms and louder silences, but the two years after we moved to the old farmhouse on the edge of the Fen were the...

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The Weight of Stillness

Mara had always found comfort in the old farmhouse, its creaking bones and dusty corners feeling more like a familiar embrace than a threat. But lately, that comfort had begun...

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The Cider House Pact

The autumn of 1987 was the season of rot. In the small town of Ashburn, the apple orchards had produced a bumper crop, but a mysterious blight had turned the...

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The Cabinet of Lost Things

When I was seven, my family moved from a cramped flat in Glasgow to a sprawling, drafty house in the Scottish Highlands. The house, called ‘The Rowan,’ had been built...

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The Third Face at the Window

It was the autumn we moved into the old farmhouse on Harlow Lane, a place that had stood empty for nearly a decade. My partner, Marcus, and I had been...

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The Hollow Tap

The first time I heard it, I thought a branch had snapped loose in the storm and slapped against my window. But that night, the sky was clear, and the...

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The Hollow Canine

I remember that evening clearly. My partner, Lena, and I had argued over something trivial—the placement of a vase, perhaps, or the way I chewed my food. I needed air,...

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The Volume Knob That Turned by Itself

I was seven when we moved into the house on Marrow Lane, a squat, brick bungalow with a yard full of dead roses. It was just me, my dad, his...

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The Harvest of Hollow Creek

The summer I turned twelve, my parents sent me to stay with my Aunt Margaret and Uncle Elias at their homestead in the remote valley of Hollow Creek. The property...

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The Weight of the Third Floor

I have debated whether to write this down for years. It’s not a grand tale, just three instances that felt real, and I cannot fully explain them. The first was...

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The Widow’s Lace

I’ve been staying at my fiancé’s grandmother’s old farmhouse while he’s on a research trip in Greenland. The house is a Victorian relic, all creaking floors and drafty windows, with...

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The Stained Glass Saint

The old mission house in the high desert of New Mexico had been in Elena’s family for three generations, but it had never felt like home to her. The thick...

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The Salt Line

I’ve always been able to feel things other people can’t. It’s not a gift, not really. It’s more like a constant low-level hum of wrongness, a texture to rooms that...

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The Ladder’s Third Step

I was eleven when we moved into my grandmother’s house, a creaky Victorian with a cellar that smelled of damp earth and old apples. My father had left, and my...

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The Last Pint

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. I thought they were just stories people told to make sense of loss, or fear, or the things they couldn’t explain. But after...

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The Red Dune Sentinel

The Mulga Creek property sprawled across ten thousand acres of spinifex and red dirt, a legacy my grandfather had carved from the outback’s stubborn heart. We weren’t rich in the...

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The Persistence of Static

At seventeen, I’d grown used to the rhythms of Ashford Hall, a sprawling boarding school nestled in the damp, pine-scented hills of the Pacific Northwest. Our dormitory, a converted Victorian...

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The Hovering Sheet

One Tuesday afternoon, after school, my boyfriend Devin and I walked to his apartment. We lived in a sprawling, old complex called Willow Creek, which had creaky floors and drafty...

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The Fourth Chair

I was watching my friend’s kid, Emma, at my new studio apartment. It was a cramped little place, all exposed brick and a single high window that let in the...

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