Ghost stories from New Zealand

The Last Relay

The first time I saw the dead was in the summer I turned eight. My grandmother had just died, and my parents had sent me to stay with my aunt...

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The Static Hour

The trouble started when I moved into the old farmhouse on Harper’s Lane, hoping to escape the city’s relentless noise. The house had stood empty for decades, its peeling wallpaper...

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The Clockwork Man in the Hall

The house on Hemlock Lane was our first real purchase, a fixer-upper with peeling wallpaper and creaking floorboards. My wife Clara and I moved in with our daughter, Ellie, who...

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The Hanging Vine

I was cutting through the old Bellamy estate, a shortcut I’d taken a hundred times, when I saw my friend Marcus through the bay window of his grandmother’s cottage. He...

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The Last Light on Ash Lane

The winter sun slanted through the net curtains, casting long, dusty beams across the linoleum floor. We were gathered around the walnut table in my grandmother’s kitchen—a room that smelled...

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The Drywall Man

The first time I saw him, I thought it was a trick of the light—a lazy smudge of dust on the new drywall in the hallway. We’d just moved into...

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The Copper Coil

Marlowe and her mother hadn’t wanted to leave their old house, but the memories were too heavy, the floors too creaky with things that weren’t mice. So they’d come to...

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The Hollow Man on Ward Six

When I was nine, my parents sent me to Camp Kestrel, a place for ‘troubled’ children, nestled in the worn-down hills of the Appalachians. We slept in old Civilian Conservation...

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The Hollow Tune of the Aurora

It was late September, five years ago, when the birch trees along the ridge turned brittle and pale, like the fingers of a dead woman. I’d come to stay with...

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The Glimpse Behind the Screen

It was a Tuesday night, and I was in my rented studio apartment on the fifth floor of an old building that had been converted from a textile factory. The...

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The Frequency of Static

The day the cat arrived, it was raining. Not the soft, apologetic drizzle that usually graces the West Coast, but a proper, hard-driving rain that beat against the tin roof...

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The Cinder Man

I never planned to tell anyone about the things that follow me. But maybe writing it down will make it feel less like they’re waiting just beyond the edges of...

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The Night the Air Went Still

In the sprawling suburbs of Melbourne, there lived a young woman named Elara who had a peculiar habit: she whistled. Not a casual, tuneless whistle, but melodies, harmonies, and entire...

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The Lantern on the Iron Bridge

My grandmother used to tell me about the night she and her friends crossed the old iron bridge over the Rangitikei River. It was a summer evening, the sky a...

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The Cartographer’s Lantern

I returned from the Kaimai Range three days ago, and I still see the light when I close my eyes. I’d joined a ten-day tramp through the North Island, a...

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The Vermilion Watcher

My father never spoke about the things he saw before he found Christ. It was my mother who let it slip one Thanksgiving, after two glasses of wine, that he...

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The Last Edition

In the autumn of 1999, I was a copy editor at the ‘Harbor City Gazette’, housed in a sprawling brick building that had once been a textile mill. The newsroom...

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The Porcelain Garden

The first time we noticed the change in the house, it wasn’t a sound but a smell. A wet, earthy scent, like a cellar after a flood, or a bouquet...

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The Static in the Walls

Mara had always been a light sleeper, but the knocking started three weeks after she moved into the old farmhouse. It wasn’t the kind of knocking you hear at a...

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The Cupboard’s Arithmetic

The year I turned twenty-three, I moved into a flat on the third floor of an old brick building in Wellington, New Zealand. The city was a maze of wind...

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The Hat at the Window

The dream was always the same: a slow tumble from a great height, the air rushing past, the ground racing up, and then the sickening jolt of awakening just before...

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The Hollow Ground

I hadn’t seen the wanderer for over a month. Every time I visited a resting place, the shaggy gray dog would appear, padding silently between the headstones, its eyes holding...

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The Pinewood Tenant

The house on Cedar Lane never felt like ours. It was a two-story Victorian with a sagging porch and a weathervane that always pointed northwest, no matter the wind. My...

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The Pale Road

Renee had always lived with a shadow that walked beside her. Not a metaphor—a literal shadow, a great hulking beast of matte black fur that moved like oil across pavement....

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