Front Porch

The Front Porch is a real ghost story from Australia. It’s about a woman who sees a charred, burned figure lurking outside her house at night.

A friend of mine named Max, told me about a frightening experience his mother had years ago. It makes my blood run cold every time I think of it. They lived in a house on an isolated property in Australia. It had once been a farm and their nearest neighbors lived a few miles away.

One night, his mother couldn’t sleep, so she got out of bed and went down to the living room. She switched on the TV and curled up on the couch, hoping that would help her fall asleep. There were no other lights on in the house, just the glow from the TV.

All of a sudden, out of the corner of her eye, his mother saw something move quickly across their front porch. She got up, turned the light on and looked out the windows but she couldn’t see anything. She left the light on, sat back down on the couch and continued watching TV.

After a couple of minutes, she saw it again. This time, she didn’t get up. She just stayed in her seat and stared out the window. When she looked at the steps that led up to the front porch, she saw a blackened shape peering in at her. It looked like a man’s head and shoulders, but it was as if he had been charred and burned. The shape was just sitting on the bottom step staring in at her.

She couldn’t see the rest of it, just the upper torso. She realized that if it was a person, she should be able to see the rest of the body because the steps weren’t that big.

Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone. Shaken by what she had seen and doubting her own eyes, she got up and went back to bed.

When she woke up the next morning, she her husband what she had witnessed. As he listened, he went very quiet and his face turned pale. When she asked him what was wrong, he told her that a couple of years before they moved into that house, it had been owned by a farmer. The man was driving his tractor out on the scrubland surrounding the house when it overturned. The tractor rolled over the man and he was crushed beneath it. The man’s body was cut in half and then the tractor burst into flames. By the time anyone realized what had happened, his body was burned to a crisp.

That was why she had only seen the upper torso of the burned, charred figure that night. The man that had been chopped in half and burned alive. Only half of him was sitting on the step and he was using his hands to run along their front porch that night. They moved not that long after she saw that…