Ghost stories from Canada

The Hollow Nursery

In the autumn of 1982, my aunt Vera agreed to watch the infant daughter of a woman named Clara, who worked with our neighbor. Clara and her husband were attending...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Window

It was the autumn of 1994 when I moved into the old carriage house behind the Merriweather estate. The main house had been converted into a museum, but the carriage...

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The Static Between Floors

It was the winter of ’09 when we moved into the old Wakefield Arms. Not the fancy part of the city, but the building had a certain grim dignity—marble steps...

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The Locked Garden Door

It was the summer of 2004, and I had just moved into a small cottage on the edge of the Ashford Woods. The previous owner, an old botanist named Mr....

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The Ledger of Vanishing Hundreds

In the autumn of 2018, I noticed the first discrepancy. I was a meticulous record-keeper, a habit born from years of financial uncertainty. Every dollar I saved was logged in...

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The Last Rotation

The first time I set foot in the old mill, I felt it breathing. Not the building itself, but something deep within its rusted iron bones, a low, rhythmic pulse...

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The Lacework of Dust

In the autumn of 2018, I found myself broke in the port city of Dunmore, on the eastern coast of Scotland. I had been hiking the Highlands and my funds...

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The Ledger of Lost Names

Marta had always prided herself on being a practical woman. She ran a small accounting firm in the dusty town of Red Mesa, where the desert sun bleached the color...

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The Basement Broadcast

Marjorie had lived in the old Carmichael house for over a decade, and in all that time, she had never felt truly alone. But she had also never felt threatened—until...

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The Lavender Glow

At twelve, I thought I understood death. It was a black hole, a void that swallowed light and laughter, leaving only the hollow ache of absence. When my grandmother, Elara,...

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The Lagrange Point

In the winter of 2009, I was a third-year physics student at a university in Montreal, sharing a cramped apartment with two other grad students, Lise and Marcus. The apartment...

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The Indentation at the Foot of the Bed

At eight years old, I learned that darkness can have weight. I lay in my narrow bed in the old farmhouse on Cedar Lane, the sheets damp with summer sweat,...

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The Rent Ledger

I never believed in haunted houses, not really. Ghosts were just stories we told to make old buildings interesting. But when the rent for the three-room flat above the old...

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The Crossed Halos

The house on Thornapple Lane had a peculiar smell, a mix of old wood, dust, and something faintly sweet, like decaying flowers. My family had moved there when I was...

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The Empty Stairwell

The summer I turned nine, we moved into a house that clung to the side of a hill like a barnacle. The town was called Farrow, a name that sounded...

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The Cartographer’s Blind Spot

It was the summer of 1994, and I was twenty-two, driving home from a dead-end job at a call center in the city. My friend, whom I’ll call Dana, lived...

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The Static Between Stations

I never liked the quiet. It wasn’t the peaceful kind that settles over a house at dusk; it was the heavy, waiting kind, like the air before a thunderstorm. My...

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The Unbending Figure

I never thought much about the night I saw the man on the roof until decades later, when a stray memory pulled me back to that red-dusted farm in the...

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The Painted Swarm

The first time I saw the moth, I thought it was a piece of ash from the incense burner. It fluttered past my grandmother’s urn in the dim lamplight of...

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The Road That Remembers

The asphalt ribbon unwound through the dense pines of northern Vermont, a dark thread stitching together forgotten towns. My cousin Dale was driving, his knuckles white on the wheel of...

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The Kestrel’s Last Flight

In the autumn of 2022, I left my cramped flat in the old mill town of Verity Falls and moved into a sprawling, sunlit bungalow on the outskirts of Maplewood,...

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The Tenant Rotation

In the autumn of my fifteenth year, my father, my older brother, and I squeezed into a two-bedroom flat on the third floor of a squat, concrete building that loomed...

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The Hollow Flue

The day we moved into the old farmhouse on Frostbite Lane, the realtor warned us about the chimney. ‘It’s a bit temperamental,’ she said, ‘but it draws well once you...

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The Red-Haired Visitor

I was seventeen when my parents left for a cousin’s wedding in Vancouver. They’d booked a four-day trip, and I’d insisted I could handle the farm alone. We lived in...

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