Ghost stories from Canada

The Cartographer’s Cipher

The city of Port Rutledge had a memory for grief. Built on the bones of a Loyalist settlement, its harbor had swallowed more than its share of sailors, and its...

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The Brook That Remembers

The salt air clung to the rocks like a second skin, and the gulls cried overhead as Elias parked his truck near the old McAllister property. He’d come to fish...

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The Unraveling of Cloth and Bone

The dream began in the familiar dimness of my childhood bedroom, but something was wrong. The walls seemed to breathe, the window panes fogged as if from a living exhalation,...

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Ghosts Of Shaunavon

July 2007, I went to my fiancés hometown of Shaunavon Saskatchewan, to visit her family. Shaunavon is a town of maybe 2000 people. Could be less for all I know....

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The Green Vest Projection

The old farmhouse outside of Fargo, North Dakota, had a way of keeping its secrets. My partner, Dana, and I rented it because it was cheap and remote, and the...

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The Crawlspace Cartographer

After the accident on the icy bridge, I spent three weeks in the hospital, my leg in a cage of pins and my head full of static. When I finally...

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The Stitched Haven

I was fourteen when my grandmother gave me Barnaby, a moth-eaten teddy bear with one button eye and a torn ear. It wasn’t a gift of love—she found it at...

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The Gable Room

In the autumn of 1983, I was twenty-two and desperate to leave my parents’ cramped bungalow in the suburbs of Halifax. When my friend Marlene mentioned that she and another...

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The Granary’s Last Tenant

I hadn’t seen my father in nearly a decade when I agreed to stay at his place in the dusty foothills of the Appalachians. The house, a sprawling Victorian relic,...

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The Green Dress

I never thought much about the mirrors in my grandmother’s house until I moved in after the funeral. The place had been in the family for generations, a sprawling Victorian...

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The Cold Room of No. 12

I was four when we moved into the old carriage house on the edge of the marsh. The place was a relic from another century, its brick walls sweating with...

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The Scratched Metal

The first time I noticed the scratches on my phone case, I thought I’d caught it on something at work. It was a thin, deep line, like the kind a...

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The Root Cellar’s Keeper

The first time I saw him, I thought it was a trick of the light. I was kneeling on the cold concrete of the old root cellar, my knees aching,...

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The Night the Bricks Listened

The two weeks since the party had been quiet, save for the lingering memory of those luminous blobs in the digital photos—fuzzy, milky spheres that seemed to hover near the...

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The Copper Horde

The day we moved into the old farmhouse, I found a penny embedded in the kitchen linoleum, right in front of the stove. I pried it out with a butter...

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The Clock in the Hallway

Marla and I moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of Morrow Hollow six months ago. It was a fixer-upper, but we saw potential. The upstairs held three bedrooms...

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The Hollow Chime

We’d been back in our old neighborhood for barely a month, in a rented bungalow on a street lined with identical post-war houses. The moving boxes were still stacked in...

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The Grain of the Floor

We moved into the Harlow house in early autumn, drawn by its price and the promise of a quiet cul-de-sac. The previous owners, the Merritts, had left in a hurry—their...

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The Stairwell Watcher

Our family moved into the old Nolan place on the edge of Frosthollow when I was eight. It was a two-story Victorian with peeling wallpaper and a staircase that creaked...

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The Grief of the Harvest

My brother Elias was born with my grandmother’s eyes—the same pale green, set deep in his face, and the same quiet way of watching the world, as if he could...

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The Frequency of Nails

Elena had always prided herself on her rationality. She was a sound engineer, a woman who dealt in measurable frequencies and signal-to-noise ratios. So when she moved into the dilapidated...

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The Saffron Room

The house on Hemlock Lane had a way of keeping secrets, but the one it kept best was the room at the end of the upstairs hall. I never went...

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The Cedar Knot

Evelyn had been harvesting cedar from the ridge behind her workshop for years. The wood was perfect for her handcrafted rocking chairs, and the solitude of the forest was a...

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The Salt Trail

Winter had wrapped the small town of Gray Hollow in a blanket of snow and silence, but the warmth inside the Kowalski house was a fortress against the cold. The...

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