Ghost stories from Canada

The Kettle Creek House

When I accepted the teaching position in the remote farming community of Kettle Creek, I knew I was in for a change of pace. The nearest city was a six-hour...

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The Ledger of Lantern Hill

The house on Lantern Hill had a way of keeping its own calendar. I learned this the summer I turned twelve, when my father inherited the place from a great-uncle...

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The Blue Vase

Last autumn, I was at my cousin’s farmhouse in rural Vermont with my twin brother, my half-sister, my older brother, and his college roommate. The farm had been in the...

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The Salt Line

My first real taste of the impossible came not in a crumbling mansion or a fog-drenched cemetery, but in the suffocating heat of a Midwestern July, inside a house that...

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The Glass Bell

I first noticed the bell three days after my return to the old mining town of Cinder Hollow, a place I had not visited in a decade. The town itself...

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The Warden of the Hallway

My grandmother’s house had always felt like a living thing, its walls breathing with the sighs of old wood and its floorboards groaning under the weight of decades. When I...

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The Cartographer’s Last Page

When I was nine, I dreamed of a red bicycle with a white basket lying in a ditch, its front wheel spinning slowly. Three days later, I found that exact...

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The Color of the Sample

I worked the night shift at the Meridian Paper Mill, a sprawling complex of rusted catwalks and hissing steam pipes that hugged the muddy banks of the Winooski River. My...

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The Hollow Corner

I’ve never been able to shut out the dead. It’s not something I chose, just a current that runs through me, carrying the last emotions of those who’ve passed. Mostly...

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The Dirt in Her Sleep

Marta had never been a dog person. The wiry little terrier that came with her husband, Leo, was tolerated at best, a creature of damp noses and muddy paws that...

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The Unstrung Gift

The last time I saw Elias March, he was hunched over a cup of cold coffee in his cluttered workshop, his fingers stained with varnish and rosin. He’d been a...

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The Inverted Gallery

Maya’s parents had left for a weekend cruise to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary, leaving her alone in the sprawling Victorian house they had inherited from her grandmother. The house was...

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The Midden’s Persistent Gaze

The old farmhouse on Cinder Road had always felt watchful, but I chalked it up to the wind rattling the windows and the constant creak of settling timbers. My two...

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The Polaroid’s Truth

Ever since I found that cheap Polaroid camera at a yard sale, I’d been documenting my life. It was a nostalgic little thing, a Sun 660, and it only cost...

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The Hanging Garden of Spite

The invitation arrived on a Tuesday, written on thick, cream-colored paper that smelled faintly of cloves. My old college friend, Agnes, had finally bought the house she’d been obsessing over...

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The Plate of Returning

Marta had always considered herself a rational woman, but over the past fortnight, her tidy flat in the converted lighthouse had begun to defy logic. It started with the small...

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The Red Gate

I was only a toddler when we left the city, my parents and I, to live on a piece of land that had been in my mother’s family for generations....

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The Dimming Room

We bought the old Wexler place on Cedar Lane. The realtor said it had been owned by the same family for almost forty years, but they’d moved to a retirement...

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The Persimmon Room

When I was twelve, my parents split, and my father moved us into a renovated farmhouse on the edge of a town called Hollow Creek. The house was old, but...

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The Last Tenant

In the hollowed-out carcass of the Pine Hollow Mall, where the only footsteps were the echoes of your own, I ran a shop that sold the memories of dead people’s...

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The Crooked Table’s Legacy

It began with a house on the edge of a small, fog-choked town in the Pacific Northwest, where the rain never really stopped and the trees seemed to lean in,...

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The Grief in the Wiring

The Fraser house sat at the end of a gravel road in New Brunswick, a two-story Victorian that had been in the family for three generations. It was the kind...

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The Locker of the Linoleum

The Salt Lake Medical Center’s lower level was a labyrinth of pale green corridors, a place where the fluorescent lights hummed a constant, weary tune. I was there to deliver...

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The Custodian of Winter

Brierwood Elementary had been closed since the spring of 2017, its wide, three-story frame of ochre brick and dark glass now a monument to a bygone era of squeaking chalk...

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