Ghost stories from Canada

The Unraveling Thread of Hemlock Creek

The old Hemlock Creek Mill had stood silent for twenty years, a skeletal monument to a forgotten era of industry. Its brick facade, once a proud testament to local craftsmanship,...

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The Last Sweep

I had agreed to help clean out the old Crestwood High building, a relic from the 1970s that had been shuttered for years. The town council had rented it to...

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The Clockwork Cat

In the autumn of 2023, I had to travel to a remote observatory for a week-long data collection project. My colleague, Marcus, was to pick me up at 4:30 AM....

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The Last Barrel in the Cellar

At the first grey light of October 14th, 1862, Union gunboats slid along the muddy banks of the Tennessee River, their cannons trained on the Confederate-held town of Carthage. For...

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The Concrete Antechamber

In the autumn of 2011, my father drove me to the municipal animal shelter on the outskirts of a town called Millbrook, a place I’d once volunteered at for a...

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The Keeper of the Hollow Battery

The old coastal fort at Blackrock Point had never seen battle. Its cannons, mute and rusted, faced a sea that never brought an enemy fleet. Built in 1847 to guard...

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Sisters Forever

After my great aunt passed away from a malignant brain tumour in May of 2013, my grandmother had a difficult time trying to cope with the loss of her only...

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The Lantern in the Levee

In the late autumn of 1957, along the sun-cracked highways of California’s Central Valley, a young farmhand named Elias was walking home from a town that no longer exists, a...

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The Cake That Ate the Light

I never believed in anything I couldn’t touch or measure. My name is Dan, and I thought the universe was a cold clockwork, and death was just a power switch....

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The Sixth Figure

My parents were married in the summer of 1984, in the small town of Millbrook, nestled in the rolling hills of Ontario. The ceremony took place in St. Andrew’s United...

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The Cinderlings

The Cinderlings arrived in a cardboard box, not a shelter. My daughter Elara found them behind the bakery, a litter of three kittens nestled in a pile of ash and...

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The Ledger of the Deep

The first time I saw Fort Porphyrion, it was a black tooth against the gray Nova Scotian sky, its iron cladding rusted to the color of dried blood. I’d been...

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The Last Telegram

The morning of October 4th, 1952, began like any other in the quiet Toronto suburb of Birchwood. Twelve-year-old Elsie watched her mother, Margaret, dust the china cabinet with a slow,...

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The Static of Hollow Pines

The first snow of December had already crusted the streets of Millbrook, a town that seemed to have been forgotten by time and progress. Hannah, a second-year online student of...

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The Vermilion Room

My great-aunt Edna had lived in the same two-story Victorian on the edge of Millbrook for over thirty years, a town so quiet it seemed to hold its breath. The...

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The Falling Cabinet

The house on Maple Street had been in our family for three generations, a sturdy brick structure built in the 1930s, sitting on a quiet cul-de-sac that backed onto a...

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The Glass-Fronted Doll

I’m writing this only 48 hours after it happened, to preserve exactly what we saw. My cousin Derek from Boulder brought his girlfriend, Maya, along with his mom, Aunt Ruth,...

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The Last Canning

When my brother Nate died, the official cause was listed as a heart attack, but my family knew better. We were told he’d been sick, that the funeral would be...

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The Lockdown Kata

In the spring of 2020, as the world ground to a halt, I found myself trapped in my small apartment in the outskirts of Thunder Bay, Ontario. My dojo had...

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The Weeping Ledger

In the autumn of 2019, my aunt, Margaret, finally received recognition for her decades of service at the County Archives. She had spent thirty years preserving the faded records of...

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The Salt Marsh Reaper

Every autumn, the fog rolls in off the Chesapeake Bay and settles over the salt marshes like a wet blanket. The locals on Tilghman Island know better than to drive...

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The Grief of Static

My great-aunt Lena faced the final weeks of August 1999 with a heavy heart. Her mother, Edna, had just turned ninety-four, and we celebrated what we knew might be our...

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The Salt-Basin Contract

In the sweltering summer of 2009, my mother ran a modest janitorial service called BrightNooks. We handled both residential and small commercial spaces, but our mainstay was a dozen aging...

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The Lantern Keeper

The town of Ashwick was the kind of place people moved to when they wanted to disappear. Nestled in the folds of the Adirondack foothills, it had one main street,...

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