Ghost stories from Canada

The Rusted Lantern

The night had settled over the salt-bitten town of Port Morrow like a shroud, the sea fog rolling in thick enough to swallow the streetlights. I was Jasper Crane, a...

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The Unseen Custodian

I never believed in ghosts until I moved into the old mill house on the edge of Blackwood Forest. The place was a fixer-upper, but the price was too good...

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The Last Tenant of Hollow Creek

My earliest memories are not of toys or birthday cakes, but of the way the floorboards in our new house creaked in the dead of night, even when no one...

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The Bell in the Root Cellar

I was seven when my parents bought the old Harlow farm, a sprawling mess of overgrown fields and collapsing outbuildings tucked behind a new subdivision. Our house was modern, but...

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The Jersey on the Wall

My parents left for a weekend cabin trip with their friends, leaving me in charge of my nine-year-old brother, Toby. We lived in an old Victorian house on the edge...

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The Thirteenth Hour

The house on Willow Creek Lane had always been quiet. Not the peaceful kind of quiet, but the heavy, waiting kind, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath....

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The Glass-Eyed Doll

I never believed in ghosts, not really. I was fascinated by them, sure, but fascination is not the same as faith. I’d read every book in the library on the...

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The Amber Room

In the autumn of 2007, when I was nine, my family traded our cramped city apartment for a sprawling Victorian house in the outskirts of a town called Hollow Pines....

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The Hollow Man in the Pines

I’ve never told anyone the whole truth. Not my therapist, not my wife, not even the priests I begged to bless our new house. I’m afraid that speaking it aloud...

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The Winter Veil

In the brittle December of 2013, I was holed up in my attic bedroom of my grandmother’s creaking Victorian house, tucked away on a dead-end street in rural Maine. My...

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The Tide That Took His Shape

After Julian died, I found solace in the strangest of places: the tide pools behind Aunt Maren’s cottage on the Oregon coast. He had loved that stretch of black sand,...

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The Clockmaker’s Debt

My earliest memory is of cold linoleum and the ticking of a wall clock that never told the right time. It hung above the door in every rental we ever...

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The Linen Room

The afternoon sun cut through the blinds in thin, dusty beams, illuminating the still air of the farmhouse. My wife, Eleanor, and I had just returned from a flea market...

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The Cinder of Rowan House

When the last wall of Rowan House crumbled into the marsh, Elara Voss thought she had finally buried the past. For three generations, her family had owned the isolated estate...

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The Clockmaker’s Bargain

The summer I turned nine, my parents sent me to stay with my grandparents in their sprawling Victorian farmhouse at the edge of the Cranston Hollow. The house itself was...

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The Pale Intruder

I never believed in ghosts, not even after my grandmother swore she saw her dead husband in the kitchen every Thanksgiving. I figured it was grief, or maybe just too...

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The Lantern’s Last Gasp

I should preface this by saying that my English, while serviceable, is not my first language—I grew up speaking Portuguese in a small coastal town, and even after twenty years...

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The Last Ferry to Stillwell

The summer I turned seventeen, I got a job at Stillwell Island, a faded amusement park squatting in the middle of Lake Ontario. It was a place of peeling paint...

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The Hollow in the Cat Tails

The town of Marrow’s Bend sat in the crook of a dead river, where the water had long since soured into a peat-dark marsh. I grew up on the north...

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The Muddy Draft

I was never one for history, but our teacher, Mr. Albright, had a way of making the past feel like a living thing. That semester, the assignment was a comprehensive...

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The Ceiling’s Constant

In the bitter winter of 2019, I rented the middle floor of a century-old brownstone on Cedar Street in the fading industrial district of Port Mercy. The building had a...

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The Dripping Red Bathing Suit

In the autumn of 1998, I rented a charming but aging farmhouse on the outskirts of a small town in rural Ohio. It was a two-story structure with a wraparound...

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The Conductive Signal

I was nine when the picture in my room began to change. It hung above my bed, a faded sepia photograph of a lighthouse on a cliff, a family heirloom...

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The Seventh Step

The house on Hemlock Lane was a Victorian relic, its gables sagging like the shoulders of a tired old man. I was seventeen, saving for a car, and my neighbors,...

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