Ghost stories from New Zealand

The Hollow Touch

I was twenty-three, fresh out of college, when I moved into the old carriage house behind the Whitmore estate. The main house had been abandoned for decades, but the carriage...

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The Lantern in the Cabbage Field

I never believed in the old stories. Growing up in the heart of the American Midwest, surrounded by endless cornfields and isolated farmhouses, you hear plenty of them—tales of phantom...

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The Salt-Scarred Night

It was a Thursday in late November, the kind of evening that felt like a held breath. The heat of the day had loosened its grip, but the air remained...

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The Lantern in the Basement

Two years have passed since I heard this account, but it still claws at my memory like a buried hand. My nephew, Daniel, told me the story with such earnestness...

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The Last Train to Narrows Bend

The pills should have fixed my thyroid, but instead they turned my thoughts into a nest of hornets. For three months, every sound was a needle, every bright light a...

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The One-Way Tremor

I remember the night it happened, but not with the clarity of a normal memory. It’s more like a scar—something that happened to me, not something I experienced. I was...

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The Stillness of the Glass

The summer I turned twelve, my parents sent me to a creaking, sun-bleached boarding school in the dry hills of New Mexico called St. Elian’s. It was a place of...

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The Hollow Doorway

The memory is a frayed ribbon, tethered to a time when the world was soft-edged and fear was a new language I was just learning to speak. I was six,...

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The Boiler’s Breathing

The afternoon sun lay heavy on the clapboard skin of the old school block, warming the timber until it creaked and sighed like a sleeping beast. Inside, the air was...

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The Invisible Circuit

The old middle school had been abandoned for years, its asphalt playground cracked and choked with weeds. I’d come there to sketch, to be alone with my thoughts, away from...

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The Copper Ash

The night was a deep, wet cold that seeped through the cracks of our old farmhouse on the outskirts of Foxglove, a town that clung to the Canadian Shield like...

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The Rusted Gate

In 2008, the town of Fenwick was a modest collection of houses and farms, its history buried beneath layers of swamp reclamation and river silt. Long before the first European...

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The Coat Hook

It was autumn, the kind of evening where the sky turns the color of bruised plums and the air smells of wet leaves and woodsmoke. I was seven, maybe eight,...

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The Frequency of Forgotten Things

In the winter of my sixteenth year, I lay in bed in the attic room of my aunt’s farmhouse, the wind rattling the loose pane. The house was old, creaking...

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The Day the Sun Stood Still

The summer I turned seven, the world was a place of endless afternoons and lazy heat. My best friend, Danny, and I were the kings of our small cul-de-sac, ruling...

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The Damp Grass Stare

It was late November, the kind of night where the cold crept up from the ground and settled in your bones. My friend Marley and I were out doing our...

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The Linen Room Arithmetic

My childhood home, a sprawling Victorian pile on the outskirts of a town that time forgot, was the oldest structure for miles around. The locals called it ‘the old Sinclair...

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The Battery’s Last Ring

In the autumn of 2012, my grandmother, Elara, was fading fast. My mother and I flew from Auckland to the small town of Wairoa, where she lived in a modest...

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The Rafter’s Pulse

I was eight when I first noticed the sound, but I think it had been there long before. It lived in the ceiling of my bedroom, in the far corner...

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The Cartographer’s Loom

I have always prided myself on a rational mind. As a field geologist, I deal in measurable data: strata, isotopes, seismic readings. So when I tell you about the three...

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The Cartographer’s Hobby

I’ve been meaning to set down my account for years, but I was always afraid of being dismissed. This forum seems as good a place as any. I’ll edit out...

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The Last Carriage

The invitation arrived in mid-September, a crisp white envelope bearing the return address of my sister, Clara. She was marrying a man named Samuel, a vineyard owner in the South...

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The Pale Figure at Lake Ainsley

The December heat was oppressive, even for the South Island. I was staying with my mate, Jake, at his family’s bach near the small town of Fernleigh. To escape the...

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The Salt and the Sable

My aunt and uncle had a cottage on the edge of the moors, a place they called ‘Greyhollow’ because of the way the wind moaned through the old stone walls....

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