Ghost stories from Canada

The Wooden Sentinels

It was the summer of ’67, the year I turned ten, when my family made the long drive from Detroit to the northern reaches of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Dad had...

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The Last Ferry

It had been years since Lila had felt the pull. Not since the accident that took her first love, Marcus, and left her with a grief so deep it felt...

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The Night of the Hollow Sun

Milo and I had been riding our bikes past the Whitlock place for as long as I could remember. It sat at the end of a dirt road that branched...

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The Last Ferry to Kettle Harbor

The fluorescent lights of the Toronto airport hummed like a trapped insect, casting a sickly glow over the departure board. Lucy stared at the list of flights, her finger tracing...

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The Blue Suit Visitor

Mara and I were sprawled across the floor of her attic bedroom, surrounded by discarded fairy lights and old yearbooks. It was our annual sleepover, and we were deep into...

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The Constant in the Basement

My father had a colleague, a brilliant physicist named Dr. Arjun Mehta, who spent the early 1960s at a renowned research institute in northern Sweden, not far from the Arctic...

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The Grand Meridian Re-Enactment

The call came on a Tuesday, just as the first real frost of October began to creep into the ironwork of the old Exhibition Grounds. My name is Evelyn Marsh,...

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The Blanket

I was six that summer, the year the corn grew taller than the barn and the cicadas sang so loud they drowned out my own thoughts. We lived in a...

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The Lantern in the Rain

The wet season arrived early that year, turning our gravel lane into a ribbon of mud that clung to our boots like a second skin. My father had taken a...

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The Umbra of Remembrance

Maya had just settled into her new life in Thunder Bay, Ontario, a city of lake winds and pine shadows. She’d left Manila, its heat and noise, for this quiet...

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The Last Fryer

My job as a regional equipment inspector takes me to a dozen towns a week, and I’ve learned to notice the small changes along familiar routes. For months, I’d passed...

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The Salt Wife

I’ve always been a city girl, but after three years in Toronto, the concrete was wearing me down. So when I moved to a tiny fishing village on the coast...

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The Ledger of Small Absences

It began with the tiny, irrational angers: the vanished teaspoons, the looping path of a single earring, the book that migrated from the nightstand to the bathroom shelf. After the...

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The Vanishing Pencil

I’ve been crashing with Dee ever since I left my old place, and I should be grateful. She’s a good friend, the kind who doesn’t pry, and she’s let me...

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The Last Tenant of Aris Lane

I’ve always been a practical man, not given to flights of fancy or supernatural beliefs. My name is Daniel, and I work as an accountant—numbers and logic have always been...

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The Unseen Guest

The house had been in our family for generations, but it wasn’t until my parents left for the night that I felt its true age. I had just returned from...

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The Window Between

When I was six, we lived in a half-timbered cottage at the edge of a village called Harlow’s End, where the woods pressed close and the train tracks ran behind...

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The Trembling Vial

The first time I felt it, I was in the bathtub, the water cooling around me, and I thought it was a muscle spasm in my calf. But then it...

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The Humming Wire

I live in a cul-de-sac in a sleepy suburb of Edmonton, Alberta. It’s the kind of place where the only sound at night is the occasional dog bark or the...

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The Weight Above

I was on a video call with my best friend, Maya, when her younger sister, Lily, wandered into frame. Her face was pale, and she spoke in a hushed, urgent...

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The Perimeter of the Third Floor

After the divorce, my grandmother moved us into her old Victorian house on the edge of the salt marshes. The house had been in the family for generations, but we’d...

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The Weeping Crucifix of Marrow Lane

My name is Elias Thorne, and I was born with a tether to the unseen that I never asked for. The midwife who delivered me in the cramped attic of...

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The Hollow Floor

The house on Meridian Lane was never meant to hold secrets, but it did. It was a narrow, three-story Victorian in the heart of a fog-choked town that seemed to...

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The Threshold of Pine Hollow

I’ve dealt with sleep paralysis off and on since college, and while I know it’s a medical thing, I can’t shake the feeling that sometimes it’s a doorway. That fear...

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