Ghost stories from Canada

The Humming Walls of Hollow Creek

I never believed in ghosts until I moved into the old Hargrove place on the edge of Hollow Creek. The town itself was a skeleton, its bones picked clean by...

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The Bookkeeper’s Ledger

The Carmody family had always been tight-lipped about the old hotel. Even before it burned down in ’74, my grandmother, Nana Rose, would only speak of it in hushed, reluctant...

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The Rust-Stained Ceiling

The house on Maple Hollow Road was a sagging Victorian with a porch that groaned like a dying animal. My parents called it a fixer-upper; my seven-year-old self called it...

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The Last Warm Thing

The old farmhouse on Mallow Road had a way of holding onto heat in the summer, but in the fall, it let go like a breath held too long. My...

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The Night the Pines Held Their Breath

My brother-in-law, Uncle Lance, and I have swapped odd stories for years, most of them the sort you’d shrug off after a beer. But the one I’m about to tell...

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The Weight of a Quiet House

The first thing I noticed about the house on Birchwood Lane was how quiet it was. Not the eerie quiet of a forgotten place, but the heavy, comfortable quiet of...

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The Snow Child’s Footprints

In the small coastal town of Umiak, where winter swallowed the world in white for six months, I spent my childhood listening to my father’s stories. One tale, passed down...

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The Phantom Keys of Ashford Manor

I’ve always been drawn to the unexplained, ever since I was a kid. While other children hid under their blankets from the boogeyman, I’d shine a flashlight into the closet,...

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The Hallway’s Breath

The first time I felt it, I was nine, standing in the hallway of our tiny bungalow on Maple Street. The house was a squat brick box, pressed against a...

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The Humming Dryer

I was nineteen, fresh out of a revival meeting where I’d given my life to Christ, and I believed with all my heart that no demon could touch me. My...

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The Ledger of Unfinished Hours

The archive wing of the Longacre Historical Society had always been a liminal place. Dust motes danced in the narrow shafts of late-afternoon light, and the air carried the faint,...

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The Painted Door

For three nights, the dream had come to me with the same unbearable clarity: I was a man named Elias, living in a rented flat on the edge of a...

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The Persistent Unwinding

The house on Birchwood Lane was a perfect rectangle of beige stucco and dark shingles, flanked by two identical monoliths of suburban contentment. At thirteen, Eliot considered himself an amateur...

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The Painted Hands

Sara called me on a gray Tuesday afternoon in late October, right after she got back from her mother’s cabin up in the foothills. She’d been gone since Friday, and...

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The Keepsake Room

The train from Montreal slid into the station at dusk, and Clara and her husband, Julian, stepped out into the honeyed light of an autumn evening. The town of Ashford,...

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The Fire in the Mirror

When I woke from that dream, my heart was hammering against my ribs like a caged bird. I was twenty-six, not twenty-four, and the woman beside me was Lena, not...

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The Moonflower Incident

Ivy had always loved the quiet hum of the night. Growing up in the sprawling outskirts of a small desert town, she found solace in the rhythmic chirp of crickets...

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The Cedar Bridge Claim

The summer I turned sixteen, my family moved to a fixer-upper on the edge of Blackwood Hollow, a name that sounded like something out of a paperback novel, but the...

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The Curator of Ash and Bone

The old lighthouse on Gull Island had been abandoned for decades, its lamp long since extinguished. I had come there, seeking solitude after the end of a relationship that had...

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The Velvet Rot

The house on Maple Hollow Lane had stood for seventy years, its bones settling into the earth like an old dog curling up to die. We moved in during the...

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My Mothers Touch

In June of 2001, my mother passed away suddenly from a brain hemorrhage. It was a huge shock for my family and I. I was 10 at the time. After...

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The Journal of the Hollow Field

I never thought I’d be writing this down, but here I am, six years into a nightmare that has no end in sight. My name is Clara, and this is...

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The Antique Wardrobe

On the last Saturday of July, my older sister, Maya, her boyfriend, and I drove out to a flea market in a village nestled between two hills. We’d seen it...

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The Mannequin in the Window

In 2003, when I was eleven, my family uprooted from our cramped city apartment to a sprawling house on the outskirts of a sleepy town called Millbrook. The house, a...

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