There were many reported hauntings in Limestone Creek, most of them in the convict-era buildings in the town centre. In the summer there was a ghost tour that ran every weekend, but even now it was on every fortnight, for the tourists who flocked to Limestone Creek in unpredictable patterns. Theirs was ‘the third-most haunted town in Australia’.

It was all bullshit, as far as Jasmine was concerned. Mr Carswell, Jasmine’s Science teacher, a staunch sceptic, had shown their class a TED Talk about how certain frequencies of sound gave people ‘the creeps’ and caused them to see blurred figures out of the corner of their eyes. Mr Carswell then explained how the wind blowing through the rocks of the Tiers sometimes makes a heavy thrumming noise, which could be contributing to the dubious history of ‘hauntings’.

They were supposed to design an experiment to test this, but no one really put much effort into it: Mr Carswell was a pushover. And, as Madison pointed out whenever he brought it up, it didn’t explain the Min Min lights that used to be seen up on the Tiers. Mr Carswell would demand photographic evidence of the lights, and then run into a tangent on swamp gas and limestone methane, which Jasmine had googled and had to admit probably wasn’t a real thing.

But Madison believed in all that sort of stuff: one of the reasons her YouTube channel had grown so big, besides the fact she was drop-dead gorgeous, was that she uploaded her own ghost tours around town, as well as seances and overnight stakeouts. While Jasmine didn’t believe in that stuff, there was no denying that Madison’s ghost stories got views.

And what earned her the most views were videos on the Hungry Man Abductions – the mystery of the five girls who disappeared in 1985 and were never found. In Limestone Creek, those disappearances were never far from anyone’s mind.

Madison was a genius when it came to creating consumable content. When you combined her looks with her varied content: make-up and fashion tips, social issues, hauntings and ghost tours and Dark Tourism, it was no surprise her channel had grown so popular. But it was the Hungry Man stories and theories that had taken her to another level; all of Tasmania, all of Australia, was still hung up on that story.

But God help anyone who mentioned the Hungry Man or the 1985 disappearances at school. Kids had been suspended for just singing the rhyme in the corridor. The whole town shied away from the topic. Old ladies at the coffee shop would give you dirty looks if you joked about it to the barista.