Ghost stories from Australia

The Vent in the Floor

I’ve lived in this house for six years now, but the first two were the worst. My older brother and I used to swap rooms on a whim, and I...

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The Face in the Fading Wallpaper

It happened three nights ago, at my grandmother’s farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The house was built in 1923, so it’s just about a century old, and the whole...

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The Mannequin’s Ledger

The store was vast, a cathedral of fluorescent light and linoleum, a place where the air hummed with the low thrum of refrigeration units and the distant clatter of shopping...

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The Coal Cellar Confession

Mira had always prided herself on her rational mind. As a night-shift pharmacist, she dealt in precise measurements and verifiable facts. Her tiny apartment above a shuttered hardware store on...

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The Phosphorescent Hour

The last Friday of summer vacation, and Lena had snuck a flashlight under her pillow, not that she needed it. The streetlight outside Holly’s bedroom window bled through the thin...

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The Hollow Stairwell

For weeks, the house on Maple Street had been quiet, almost too quiet. I’d moved in after my grandmother passed, hoping to find some peace in the small, creaky Victorian....

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The Keeper of Ash and Oranges

Let me tell you about my Uncle Rowan. He wasn’t my uncle by blood, but a close family friend who’d earned the title. Rowan was a giant of a man...

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The Tuxedoed Man in the Hall

Three nights ago, the clock on the microwave read 3:00 AM, and the silence in our rented farmhouse was so thick you could choke on it. My younger cousin Mateo...

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The Glass Hall

We had been on the road for ten days, weaving through the red earth and eucalyptus of the south-west, my mother’s battered Camry groaning under the weight of our luggage...

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The Hollow Floorboards

I never knew silence could be so loud until we moved into the bungalow on Cedar Lane. It stood at the end of a cul-de-sac, its porch tilted like a...

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The Marrow of Winter

In the deep of a North Dakota December, the town of Grafton lay buried under a week of unbroken snowfall. Miles of skeletal cottonwoods lined the frozen river, their branches...

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The Cistern’s Tenant

The summer I turned thirteen, my family moved into a crumbling farmhouse in the Finger Lakes, far from the suburban noise of Rochester. My parents hoped the isolation would cure...

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The Bathroom Lock

I’ve always thought of our apartment as a sanctuary, a quiet refuge from the bustling city below. But lately, the silence has been anything but comforting. It started with small...

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The Pattern in Static

The first time I saw the static, I blamed the old television. But the set was off, unplugged, gathering dust in the corner of my apartment. Yet there it was—a...

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The Uninvited Visitor

My name is Maya, and I’m fourteen. I never believed in the supernatural until that night, but now I can’t shake the feeling that something followed me home from the...

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The Flicker in the Static

Even now, three weeks after we moved into the white clapboard house on Marrow Lane, I can’t shake the feeling that the walls are breathing. I’m not one for dramatics;...

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The Cartographer’s Guest

When I inherited my great-uncle’s house in the town of Pemberton, I expected dust and old furniture, not the lingering chill that followed me from room to room. The house...

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The Lantern’s Debt

It happened six months ago, on a night that began with the hum of a dying generator. My brother, Elias, and I were alone in our grandmother’s old farmhouse, a...

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The Last Tenant

The moment I stepped into the place, I knew it was a mistake. The front gate sagged on its hinges, and the paint on the porch was peeling like sunburned...

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The Glass Concerto

I started working the graveyard shift at the Orpheum, a converted symphony hall turned nightclub, three weeks after I moved to the city. The place had a reputation, but I...

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The Frequency of the Hungry

Six months after I moved into the old carriage house behind the bakery, I began to notice things. Not the kind of things you can dismiss as drafts or creaking...

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The Third Door

When we moved into the old farmhouse, I was excited. The previous owners had left behind a few pieces of furniture, including a heavy oak wardrobe in my room. It...

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The Moth Room

When my grandparents bought the farmhouse on Cedar Hollow Road, it had been rotting in the Pennsylvania woods for nearly a decade. The locals called it the Heisel House, after...

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