The Haunting of Belfast: A Modern Ghost Story (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798180008053)

An historic home. A fresh start. But some secrets refuse to stay buried beneath the soil.

When Sarah Callaghan returns to her childhood home of Belfast with her husband, Mark, and their two children, it is supposed to be a new beginning. They move into 14 Wellington Park, a magnificent, meticulously restored four-storey Victorian redbrick in the affluent Queen's Quarter. On the surface, it is everything the estate agent's photographs promised.

But the house is holding itself very still.

Within weeks of moving in, the modern smart-home technology begins to warp. The mesh Wi-Fi network develops eerie, expanding "dead zones" that perfectly mirror the dimensions of the walled rear garden. The high-tech Nest Hub Max begins cycling through family holiday photos that aren't quite right, revealing a pale, silent child standing in the background. The hyper-efficient underfloor heating fails completely, plunging the concrete kitchen extension into a localized, bone-chilling 11 C cold snap.

Then come the sounds at precisely 03:14 AM.

Through his high-end gaming headset, fifteen-year-old Leo hears the deep, mechanical, rhythmic thrumming of long-gone Victorian power looms vibrating through the structure of the house, accompanied by the wet, persistent coughing of a collective multitude. Outside, seven-year-old Maya looks out her bedroom window into the rain-flooded garden and sees them: a silent crowd of small, pale children standing in the dark soil, looking up at the house.

Driven to find answers, Sarah uncovers a dark, uncatalogued 1850s ledger in the archives of the Linen Hall Library kept by a foreman named W.J. Coulter. It details the horrific secret history of a private, illegal "child labour annex" that once stood on their exact plot of land, and the forty to sixty nameless children buried without markers beneath their lawn.

As the autumn rain oversaturates the earth, a subterranean pressure mounts. The black water pooling in the garden begins to tremble, and the line between the past and the present completely erodes. The Callaghans must face the terrifying reality that they have built their life on top of an unacknowledged atrocity, and the ground is finally demanding to be heard.