Ghost stories from Canada

The Kitchen Light Hums in G Major

The first thing I noticed about the house on Hemlock Road was the kitchen light. It hummed, not the usual electric buzz, but a clear, resonant hum, like a single...

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The Stone Corridor

In the sweltering summer of 2010, I brought my wife, Elena, and our eighteen-month-old daughter, Mira, to the old limestone fortress of Fort Drakewell, perched on a cliff above the...

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The Price of Ash and Iron

The day we moved into the old farmhouse, the sky was the color of a bruise. I’d told Elena it was a good sign, a cleansing rain, but the way...

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The Hollow Between the Walls

The Hartley family had always considered themselves blessed. They lived in a modest, newly built house on Cedar Lane, a quiet street where the lawns were neat and the neighbors...

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The Salt Ledger

The first time I noticed the ledger was on a Tuesday, three weeks after we’d moved into the old farmhouse on Redmine Road. I was nine, and the house had...

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The Hollow Cradle

It had been fourteen months since I moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of the cranberry bog, a place so remote that the nearest neighbor was a mile...

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The Disk of Midnight

The moon hung low over the small desert town of San Junipero, its pale light casting long, distorted shadows across the dusty streets. In a modest adobe house on the...

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The Moonlit Caller

In the quiet town of Millbrook, Vermont, I live with my husband, Arthur, and our three dogs: two Great Danes, Brutus and Cassius, and a mixed breed named Nelly, whom...

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The Silent Sentinel of the Old Farmhouse

Elena had always felt uneasy in her parents’ farmhouse, but it was a familiar discomfort, like the creak of the stairs or the draft from the attic. She grew up...

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The Weight of Silence

Our house in the foothills of the Cascades was a place of creaks and sighs, the kind of noises you attribute to an old structure settling into its foundation. My...

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The Mortician’s Ledger

I never believed in ghosts, not even after my family moved into the old Blackwood house. The place had been a doctor’s office and temporary morgue in the late 1800s,...

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The Creak of the Landing

I have always believed in the unseen, the phantoms that linger at the edge of perception. But until last week, my faith had never been tested by something so tangible,...

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The Staircase Visitor

I remember the summer before I turned eighteen, when I spent Friday nights at my grandfather’s farmhouse in the rolling hills of Vermont. The place had been in our family...

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The Weight on the Blanket

The first time it happened, I was reading in the armchair, my feet propped on the ottoman. Jasper, my tabby, was a lump of warm indifference on the windowsill, ignoring...

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The Keeper of the Lantern

My sister Elara passed in the autumn of 2009, when the leaves were falling and the air had that brittle, cold edge. I had written about her once, a clumsy...

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The Pale Boy of Room 14

On the morning of December 3rd, 2023, I woke with a start in our cramped motel room, the outskirts of a dying desert town stretching endlessly beyond the peeling blinds....

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The Locket of the Serpent’s Bride

I remember the exact moment I learned that my grandmother wasn’t just eccentric—she was a conduit. It wasn’t from a bedtime story or a whispered confession; it was from a...

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The Cinder Man

I had another true story to tell, this one from the old farmhouse my family rented when I was twelve—the one with the rusted windmill and the field that always...

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The Violet Bottle

I’ve lived at 13 Ravenwood Lane for nearly eight years now, ever since I was eight and my parents brought us here from the city. I’m turning sixteen on New...

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The Scratch and the Itch

The first thing I noticed about the house on Hemlock Lane was the floorboards. Not the creak of them, but the feel of them, slightly rough underfoot, as if someone...

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The Glass Ward

I don’t usually share my dreams on this site, but this one crosses the line into something I can’t explain. It started when I was thirteen, during a summer stay...

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The Basement’s New Resident

The first thing I noticed about the house on Maple Street was the smell—a faint, earthy odor, like freshly turned soil, that clung to the air even after we’d aired...

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The Door That Held the Dark

I was fourteen when we moved into Aunt Cora’s house, a narrow Victorian on Bramble Lane. My parents had split the year before, and Dad got the house, Mom got...

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The Cradle of Ash

In the autumn of 2003, Mara and I finally got the call. After years of trying, of failed fertility treatments and the endless paperwork of adoption, we had been matched...

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