Ghost stories from Canada

The Lantern Man and the Basement Room

At sixteen, I had a paper route that required me to leave the house at four in the morning, when the streetlights still hummed with a sickly orange glow and...

Read Story →

The Amber Drifter

The first time I heard her was on a Tuesday, the kind of damp autumn afternoon that makes the walls of a house feel like they’re leaning in. I was...

Read Story →

The Offering of the Hollow Saints

My name is Daniel, and this began three autumns ago when I accepted a fellowship to study the fading murals in the mountain monasteries of the Vestro valley. The locals,...

Read Story →

The Salt House

My grandmother-in-law, Edith, was the most resilient person I’ve ever known. She raised nine children on a crumbling farm in the middle of the Nebraska prairie, and she buried six...

Read Story →

The Cipher Under the Linoleum

My name is Elias, and I’m nineteen now, but the thing that happened when I was ten still sits in my chest like a swallowed stone. We lived in a...

Read Story →

The Lantern Keeper

I was six years old when I first felt it, trailing me through the hemlock and cedar behind our house in Maple Ridge. My mother called it my ‘imaginary friend,’...

Read Story →

The Constant Creak

The arrangement began as a practical solution. I, Eleanor, had been juggling three children and a leaking apartment roof when my old college friend, Priya, offered her sprawling Victorian house...

Read Story →

The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

In the heat of a July evening, in the farming town of Ashwick, seventeen-year-old Elara was sent by her mother to fetch a few staples from the general store two...

Read Story →

The Rose-Scented Visitor

It began when I was seven, during a summer visit to my great-aunt Helena’s rambling farmhouse in the Appalachian foothills. My cousin, Marcus, who was five, and I were sent...

Read Story →

The Erasure of Minutes

Marta first suspected something was wrong when the clock on her bedside table began to run backward. It was a cheap digital thing, a gift from her grandmother, and the...

Read Story →

The Drowned Oar

In the summer of 1932, in a remote corner of the Finnish lake country, nine-year-old Elias and his friends often escaped the watchful eyes of their parents. They lived in...

Read Story →

The Hand on the Tiled Wall

In the autumn of 2014, I was staying at my cousin’s apartment in the city, helping her prepare for her first child. It was a Thursday night, and I had...

Read Story →

The Constant at the Window

Mara had lived in the coastal town of Port Renfrew her entire life, twenty-eight years nestled between the dripping pines and the gray Pacific. She worked as a night auditor...

Read Story →

The Fourth Floor Lace

I was four when I first saw her, and she was the reason I stopped sleeping with my door open. Her image is burned into my memory like a photograph...

Read Story →

The Uninvited Melody

The old farmhouse stood silhouetted against a bruised twilight sky, its weathered timbers groaning a mournful tune that seemed to seep from the very earth. Elara and her grandmother, Agnes,...

Read Story →

The Duplicate at Dawn

The attic air hung thick and still, a testament to decades of undisturbed dust. Elara, perched on an overturned crate, felt the familiar tingle of nervous excitement. Her friends, Maya...

Read Story →

The Unseen Guest at the Party

After a night spent with friends, laughing and sharing stories, I returned home the next day. My father met me at the door with a puzzled look. ‘Why did you...

Read Story →

The Brand of the Unraveling

I’ve always been a patchwork of oddities. The dead have never been strangers to me; they’ve been as constant as my own heartbeat. From my first wobbly steps, I could...

Read Story →

The Mirror at Dawn

The old farmhouse had a stillness that felt less like peace and more like held breath. I was nine when I first saw her, a blur of white at the...

Read Story →

The Overalls in the Static

It began, as these things often do, with a child’s night terror. My daughter, Lily, was barely four when we spent a summer at my aunt’s old farmhouse, a creaking...

Read Story →

The Knob That Wouldn’t Turn

Elena lived in a cramped apartment on the fourth floor of a building that had seen better decades. The walls were thin, the pipes groaned, and the radiators clicked like...

Read Story →

The Barber’s Chair

I’ve never been one to trust the creaks and groans of an old building, but when I moved into the apartment above Luigi’s Barbershop, I figured the ghosts of a...

Read Story →

The Hollow Between Walls

When I was nine, my parents moved us into a sprawling, Victorian-style house on the edge of a pine forest. The place had been abandoned for years, and the real...

Read Story →

The Grinding Hymn

My cousin, Delia, and I had been volunteering at the old Bramblewood Stables for two summers, and we’d heard the whispers. The locals said the hayloft was bad news, that...

Read Story →