Fernlea River

There’s a tiny village on the Midlands Meander, more of a hamlet actually, with the grandiose name of Lions River. Most people drive straight through it without a second glance. There’s a garage. And a leatherwork studio tucked in behind it. There’s a general store and a river that curls quietly past all of it, unremarkable, until you learn to look properly.

That village is where the story of  “Strange Sightings at Fernlea River” begins.

Every village in the Haunted Highway series borrows its setting from somewhere real. A shopfront here, a bend in the river there, a particular quality of afternoon light that’s hard to invent from nothing. Fernlea River is no exception. Jakes’ garage, Cobbie’s leatherwork studio, and Willy’s pottery at the old mill, a few kilometres on the other side of the road: all of them grew out of places that genuinely exist, reshaped just enough to let a story happen around them.

What doesn’t exist, as far as we know, is the ghost.

Book 4 takes the series somewhere it hasn’t quite gone before. Readers of Books 1 to 3 will know the Haunted Highway has always had a little something extra running under its mysteries, a sense that not everything can be explained by ordinary means. In Strange Sightings at Fernlea River, that undercurrent finally comes to the surface. Someone or something has been seen near the water. Not by one person, but by several, none of whom particularly wanted to see it.

We won’t say more than that yet.

What we will say is that this book marks a small turning point for the series, in more ways than one, and we’re looking forward to telling you a bit more about that very soon.

“Strange Sightings at Fernlea River” publishes on Amazon on November 11.

Richard Lyon

October 2026