"Picnic at Hanging Rock" is a really mysterious and spooky story. It's presented as based on a true story that happened in 1900, but as I found out in the net, it's completely fiction. 
 Things are never fully explained and I could only guess the real causes and the real cruel or strange motives. As I finished reading it almost at night-it gave me shivers, because I didn't expect this book to create such a spooky and fearful atmosphere. The biggest horror is the mix of haziness and cruelty of people. The endings (the book missed the last chapter, so I had to find it in the internet. It is called "The Secret of Hanging Rock") were so unexpected and the missing chapter explained a lot. But still a lot must be guessed at. As Australia is famous for aborigines and spiritualism, I think that this helped the mystical theme a lot. In some way the last chapter cleared some mystique, but it didn't spoil it. I still think about the book and I am still trying to figure out if the deaths(?) on the hanging Rock were murders or suicides. I still can't recover from the cruelty of the master "witch". Maybe I'm too sentimental when I read about the strange deaths of children. But anyway, it's more intriguing to let readers' interpret for themselves. Still, the story without a clear ending, leaves a feeling of incompleteness and it's unsatisfying in some way.