Ghost stories from Canada

The Weight of Unpacked Things

I’ve always been the type to leave my suitcase half-open for weeks after a trip, a mess of worn clothes and crumpled receipts spilling onto the floor. It’s a habit,...

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The Latched Door

I’ve lived in a handful of places that felt off, but the old farmhouse outside of Smiths Falls, Ontario, takes the cake. We moved there in the fall of 2004,...

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The Hollow Bloom

The day my grandmother died, I was standing in the fluorescent glare of a gas station restroom, washing my hands. I’d stepped out for a soda, a brief reprieve from...

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The Weave of the Last Carpet

Sixteen, that’s how old I was when I watched the last carpet come unraveled in my father’s wool shop. We lived above it, in an old mill town that had...

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The Copper Plate Negatives

The night air in Valverde, a dusty town two hours from the capital, clung to me like a damp shroud when I walked into the clinic’s lab for my first...

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The Man in the Static

Ever since I could remember, I had a strange aversion to being touched. As a toddler, I would squirm and cry in anyone’s arms, preferring the cold, silent corners of...

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The Thermal Divide

Three months after Lucas left for the pipeline job up north, the house on Maple Street started breathing. Not in a poetic, wind-in-the-eaves way, but in a deliberate, rhythmic expansion...

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The Twelfth of June

My wife, Lena, and I had just moved into the old farmhouse on the edge of Wolf Creek, three months after our wedding. The place had been in her family...

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The Concrete Garden

On the first Monday of October, Ellen Marsh pulled her rusted sedan into the cracked driveway of 8 Thornwood Court. The rent was absurdly low—four hundred dollars a month for...

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The Hall of Borrowed Hours

The trouble began when I was eight, in the autumn we moved to the old farmhouse on Cedar Lane. Our family of four—my mother, father, older brother Jamie, and me—had...

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The Fingers of Room 12

Lena had always known the old farmhouse on Birchwood Lane was wrong. She’d grown up there, the kind of wrong that settles into your bones like cold water, until you...

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The Final Ledger

On the last night of 1999, Nadia and I found ourselves driving through the outskirts of a small, forgotten town in the Cascade foothills. Every hotel in the city had...

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The Claw Under the Comforter

It was the summer before I turned thirteen, and we’d moved into the old Merriweather House on the edge of Saltmarsh. The house had been built in the 1920s, and...

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The Keyhole Keeper

I was twelve that year, and my bedroom was a narrow rectangle at the end of a long hallway in an old Victorian house my family had rented. The walls...

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The Unseen Room

I never believed in the supernatural. Not as a child, not as an adult. The house I grew up in was an old Victorian on the outskirts of a small...

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The Unfocused Lens

In the sweltering summer of 2014, in the sprawling suburban wasteland of Maplewood, Arizona, I found myself exiled to the basement of my aunt’s split-level house. The air was thick...

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The Cardboard Dial

We called it the Cardboard Dial, a crude circle scribbled on a pizza box with a upturned glass as the planchette. Four of us huddled in the damp basement of...

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The House on Cinder Lane

When I was nine, my family loaded our lives into a rented trailer and followed a two-story Victorian house that creaked and groaned on the back of a flatbed truck....

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The Cradle of the Hollow

I’ve been meaning to write this down for years, but the words always felt too heavy. Then I found this site, and reading all of your accounts made me realize...

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The Marrow Thief

At 5:19 AM, the digital clock on the nightstand glared like a baleful eye. I hadn’t slept, not really, just lying there with the weight of yesterday’s phone call pressing...

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The Painted Mirror

The first time I saw her was through the frost on my bedroom window in early December, the year I turned eight. Her silhouette was tall and thin, like a...

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The Puppy in the Walls

The summer I turned thirteen, my mother and I finally stopped running. After a string of cramped apartments and motel rooms, we landed in a dilapidated farmhouse on the edge...

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The Uninvited at the Lacquer Table

At nine, I had two worlds: the sunlit realm of my room, where my dolls lived in a plastic mansion, and the dim, breathing vestibule that lay between my door...

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The Grey Cairn

The summer I turned thirteen, my mother and I moved to a rented farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by endless fields of golden wheat that swayed like a...

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