Ghost stories from Canada

The Lantern’s Vigil

The summer I turned twelve, my grandmother’s farm in the Appalachian hills felt like a world of its own. The cabin had no electricity, only oil lamps and the soft...

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The Lantern in the Culvert

The summer of 2011 had been brutal. The air in Bakersfield hung thick and heavy, even at three in the morning, when I was walking home from my friend’s place...

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The Hollow Room

My parents bought the old farmhouse in the autumn of 1974, a crumbling stone beast crouched on a hill above the town of Saint-Michel-des-Bois. We moved from our small apartment...

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The Glass Door’s Second Glance

In the autumn of 2019, I was living in a rented cottage on the outskirts of a small town called Harlow’s Bend. The house was old, with creaky floors and...

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The Clock Tower’s Chime

In the autumn of 1981, I was fifteen and had just arrived in the small town of Millbrook, Ontario, to live with my grandmother, Agnes. My parents were in Malaysia,...

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The Constant at the Doorway

In the autumn of my eighth year, I woke to the sound of my own breathing, a thin rasp against the pillowcase. The house—a sprawling Victorian my parents had bought...

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The Salt Line

Elara had always thought the cottage was charming, with its ivy-covered stone walls and the way the morning mist clung to the surrounding pines. But that was before she understood...

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The Last Lungful

The St. Agatha’s Long-Term Care wing smelled of antiseptic and boiled cabbage, a perfume that clung to Delia’s scrubs no matter how many times she washed them. She’d worked there...

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The Third Floor Tenant

In the autumn of 2011, I found myself standing before an aging Victorian house on Bramble Lane, its turrets and wrap-around porch promising a charm that the city’s newer builds...

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The Stairwell of the Old Stokes House

The first time I heard the steps, I was seven, standing at the bottom of the grand staircase in my great-aunt’s house in rural Vermont. The house was a Victorian...

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The Keeper of the Brass Key

The house my father built sat on a ridge above the town of Morrow’s Landing, where the Fraser River bent like a fractured spine. It was a tall, narrow thing,...

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The Last Ferryman’s Ledger

In the winter of 1981, I worked as the night maintenance engineer at the Meridian Canning Company, a sprawling brick complex that had been cannibalizing itself for nearly a century....

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The Sump Pump’s Lament

For thirteen years, I’d kept the Old Bolton Road Pump Station humming. It wasn’t a fire hall, but a decommissioned water treatment facility, a maze of concrete corridors and rusted...

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The Pinning Weight

The first time it happened, I thought I was dreaming. My limbs were heavy, as if someone had poured cement into my bones, and an invisible force pressed me into...

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The Doont

My earliest memories are of the old farmhouse on Cinder Lane, a place my family moved to when I was four. It was a sprawling, two-story structure with a wrap-around...

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The Cold That Ate August

The invitation had come from my wife’s cousin, Margo, who with her husband, Leo, owned a cottage on a small island in the middle of Lake Nipissing. The island was...

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The Amber Glare

The building on Meridian Street was ancient, its bricks stained with a century of soot, its corridors smelling of dust and old wood. My fiancée, Lena, and I moved into...

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The Polaroid in the Trash

It was my fifth birthday, and we were celebrating in our cramped two-bedroom apartment on the third floor of the Meridian Arms—a building that always smelled of boiled cabbage and...

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The Thirteenth Floor’s Bloom

My name is Elias, and after my mother, sister, and youngest brother moved north to be with our aunt, I went to live with my older brother, Marcus, and our...

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The Grain of the Wood

We’d been in the house on Cypress Lane for about fourteen months when the first thing I couldn’t explain happened. It wasn’t the first odd occurrence—there was the time I...

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The Last Walkthrough

The burger joint sat at the edge of town, a squat building with a faded sign that buzzed faintly in the night. I’d worked there for two years, climbing from...

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The Last Storm

The hospital room was quiet save for the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor and the distant rumble of thunder. Agnes had been unconscious for three days, her frail body...

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The Constant on Channel 9

It started as a joke, the kind of idle chatter that fills the blue glow of a Thursday night in late October. I was on a group video call with...

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The Salt Line

The apartment in Port Grimshaw wasn’t much to look at: a converted cannery with exposed beams and a view of the slate-gray bay. I moved there with my two boys,...

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