Ghost stories from New Zealand

The Ember Man

My name is Elian, and I’m nineteen next week. Age matters because my hauntings started when I was barely five, or so my family insists. My brother, Marcus, was the...

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The Ironing Board Vigil

The Cedarwood Rest Home was a Victorian relic, its red brick facade softened by ivy and time. Originally a tuberculosis sanatorium in the 1920s, it had been converted to a...

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The Magnet Room

I never believed in ghosts, not really. My name is Sam, and I live in a cramped studio above a laundromat in the industrial part of Christchurch. The building is...

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The Stained Ceiling

My name is Leo, and I’m twelve. I’ve had two encounters with things that shouldn’t exist. The first happened when I was seven, in a cramped flat above my mother’s...

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The Hollow Hearth

The day we moved into the farmhouse at the edge of the Bitterroot Valley, the sky had that bruised, pre-storm color. My father, a contractor who took jobs wherever he...

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The Tenant in the Gap

At nineteen, Lena had grown used to the quiet gaps in her new apartment—the hollow space between the radiator and the wall where a bookshelf might have stood, the narrow...

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The Salt and the Silt

My grandmother always said I was born with the veil lifted, that I came into this world with one foot in the river and the other on the bank. She...

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The Carpet’s Teeth

The house on Hemlock Lane swallowed the afternoon sun whole. I was nine, my sister Mira was seven, and we thought we had inherited a castle. Our father, a contractor...

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The Lantern Man’s Gift

In childhood’s quiet hours, when the house settled into its nightly creaks, I dreaded the walls. They were not the plaster and paint of our ordinary home, but a shifting...

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The Hollow Candle

A few weeks after her grandmother’s death, nineteen-year-old Elara was staying with her closest friends in a rented beach house on the Outer Banks. The house was old, with creaking...

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The Errant Red

The old mill had been our home for three years before I saw it. It wasn’t a real mill anymore, just a hollow husk of rusted gears and rotting timber...

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The Gilded Gate

My name is Elara, and for as long as I can remember, my family has been… different. We see things others don’t, hear whispers from the spaces between. It’s not...

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The Bone Lanterns of Kauri Hollow

My name is Elara, and I’ve lived in the small, mist-wreathed town of Kauri Hollow all my life. It sits at the edge of a vast, tangled forest that locals...

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The Lantern in the Reeds

My childhood home sat at the edge of the marsh, where the land turned from hard-packed dirt to a maze of black water and cattails. The house itself was a...

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The Fossil in the Attic

I’ve never been one to seek advice, and I’m not sharing this for sympathy. I’m sharing it because maybe someone out there has felt the same weight, the same cold...

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The Gilded Hound of Karapiro

In the summer of my twenty-first year, I had crossed the strait from the South Island to stay with my father in a small town nestled against a dark, man-made...

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The Looming Figure at Midnight

My younger sister, Lena, had a room at the end of the upstairs hallway in our old farmhouse. The room was small, with a single window that overlooked the overgrown...

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The Cold Ash

Three years ago, my friends and I were obsessed with capturing proof of the afterlife. We’d ditched the fancy gear for two battered camcorders and a voice recorder that had...

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The Iron Cadence

I’ve always found solace in the quiet pathways of Saint Elara’s Rest, the old cemetery that sprawls along the hillside overlooking the marsh. The air there is thick with the...

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The Bone Garden of Ashworth Lane

In 2004, I was twelve and inseparable from my best friend, Danny. We lived on the edge of a small town, and across from Danny’s house stood a dilapidated Victorian...

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The Bone Weaver’s Loom

I was seven when we moved into the old farmhouse, a sprawling relic of a place with a bell tower that never rang and a cellar that smelled of wet...

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The Red-Eyed Guest

The ferry ride to Cradle Island was always quiet this late, the dark water slapping against the hull like a patient hand. I’d come with my friend Lena to her...

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The Summons of the Checkerboard Floor

My wife, Helen, and I had risen with the pale winter sun to drive to the neighboring town of Bramblewood, a forty-minute journey, to pick up our new kitten, a...

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The Cattleguard’s Tenant

I live in the outskirts of Dunmore, a small town that clings to the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains like a burr on a hound’s ear. Old Man Harlow’s...

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