Ghost stories from South Africa

The Hollow Space

I moved to the coastal town of Grayhaven six months ago, seeking quiet after a messy divorce. The house was a relic from the 1920s, perched on a cliff overlooking...

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I’m Marcus, a sixteen-year-old from Johannesburg, and I’ve always been drawn to the unexplained. This happened last December, at my grandparents’ farm near the Drakensberg mountains, where an old Anglo-Boer...

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The Bell Jar of Hollow Creek

I was seventeen when I found the bell jar in my grandfather’s attic, nestled between a rusted lantern and a stack of yellowed newspapers from the 1970s. The jar was...

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The Cinder and the Ash

The new house on Hemlock Lane was a Victorian relic, all peeling paint and sagging porches, but it was the first place that felt like ours. Mom had married Dale...

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The Puppet’s Rehearsal

It began on a Tuesday night in late autumn, in a small town called Oakhurst, nestled in the Pacific Northwest. I was sixteen, and my name is Jamie. I had...

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The Bone That Knocked

Our granddaughter Elara spends most weekends with us since her mother passed. She’s always been strange—sees things that aren’t there, knows when the phone will ring before it does. We’ve...

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The Rattle of Woven Reeds

I have never been the superstitious type. Growing up in the bustling coastal city of Maputo, I prided myself on logic and reason, rolling my eyes at the whispered tales...

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The Fallen Frame

On the first Tuesday of March, just after lunch, I received a text from my oldest child, Miriam. The message read simply: ‘Something is off.’ I knew better than to...

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The Neon Pilgrim

The annual festival of the burnished masks had come to the small mountain town of Kirav, and with it, the obligatory day of excess. This year’s theme was ‘Gilded Shadows,’...

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The Constant Companion

The old farmhouse sat at the edge of a dying town, its wooden bones creaking under the weight of decades. I had moved in only a month ago, seeking solitude...

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The Turn of the Key in the Fog

The old house next door had been empty for three years, its windows like sunken eyes staring at the vineyard that stretched beyond our row of cottages. I’d grown used...

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The Porcelain Saint and the Floorborn

When I was nine, summer in our little tract house in the Nevada desert was a thing of shimmering heat and the constant hum of window units. My grandmother, a...

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The Charred Door

I live in a quiet cul-de-sac in the outskirts of a town that prides itself on being uneventful. The house itself is a sturdy Victorian, painted a faded yellow, with...

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The Casserole Dish

In the months before, strange static had plagued our phone line. A woman’s voice, thin as a needle, sometimes surfaced in the crackle, asking, ‘Can you hear me?’ Then, one...

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The Blue Afternoon

In the summer of 1982, I was twelve years old, sitting on the cracked concrete steps of our trailer porch in the dusty town of Pahrump, Nevada. The air was...

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The Spinning Pedals

The house on Maple Street had always been a bit… off. The walls seemed to breathe, and the floorboards creaked in patterns that didn’t match footsteps. I’d lived there with...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

The summer I turned sixteen, my mother, my sister Lena, and I moved into a drafty Victorian house on the edge of a town called Stillwater. The house had been...

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The Weight of the Hollow

The night of the autumnal equinox, the farm house settled into its familiar creaks and groans. I lay in the master bedroom, the one with the peeling floral wallpaper and...

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The Conductor’s Last Broadcast

Mara had always been the pragmatic one in her family. While her parents and younger brother, Leo, spoke in hushed tones about the lingering cold spots in their old farmhouse,...

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The Polished Brass Button

The night shift at St. Wilfred’s Psychiatric Annex was always a different beast. I, along with Senior Nurse Dlamini and Nurse Khumalo, were responsible for the male ward, a sprawling...

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The Cinder Room

I never believed in ghosts, not really, not until the night the air in my new apartment turned to smoke and ash. My name is Elara, and I lived on...

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The Hollow Night Sister

The rain came down in sheets against the windows of the children’s wing at St. Jude’s Memorial, a sprawling concrete structure that had seen better decades. I was on the...

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The Glass Partition

It was the winter of 1982 when I started my night shifts at St. Jude’s Children’s Ward, a sterile corridor of pastel walls and the faint smell of antiseptic. The...

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The Unseen Visitor

The corridors of St. Catherine’s Hospital in the quiet town of Millbrook had a way of swallowing sound. The thick, rubber-soled shoes of the night nurses barely whispered against the...

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