Ghost stories from Canada

The Jade Comb

When Eleanor met Marcus, she thought she had found her forever. They dated for four years, and on their second anniversary, he surprised her with a trip to the summit...

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The Last Train to Meridian

The last train to Meridian left Union Station at 11:47 PM. Maya had missed it by forty seconds, watching the glowing tail of the final car shrink into the dark...

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The Cardboard Box

I never believed in ghosts until that New Year’s week in Omaha, Nebraska. My family had scattered for the holidays, and I found myself tagging along with my aunt and...

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The Crooked Floorboard

My family moved into the old Atwater house in early November. The rent was a steal, and the landlord, a wiry man named Mr. Grimshaw, had a nervous tic that...

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The Paint on My Ceiling

The moment I stepped into the basement apartment on Cedar Lane, I knew I had to take it. The walls were the color of old parchment, the ceiling a patchwork...

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The Last Cargo of the Mariana

The Mariana was not a ship that invited curiosity. She was a tramp freighter, rust-streaked and heavy with years, hauling whatever paid: scrap metal, old machinery, and, on this final...

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The Mannequin’s Veil

I have always believed in the unseen—the whisper of a draft in a still room, the chill that races down your spine for no reason. My family was never religious;...

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The Flipping Tongue

Mara had lived in the same apartment for years, a creaky old flat in a converted Victorian house on a quiet street in Edmonton. The landlord was cheap, the pipes...

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The Hollow Stairwell

My mother told me this story, and she swore it was true. It happened when she was young, barely nineteen, and restless. She and two friends, Lena and Marcus, decided...

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The Cartographer’s Debt

The first time I saw the map, I was seven. It was my grandmother’s, rolled up in a dusty tube in her attic, and I unrolled it out of boredom...

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The Winter Veil

Last February, I rented a small hermit’s hut on the edge of the Great Salt Marsh, a place where the wind never stopped moaning through the reeds. The nearest town...

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The Thirteenth Floor

I was in Osaka for a corporate conference, and the hotel they booked me into was the Grand Fuji Tower, a glass monolith that loomed over the Namba district like...

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The Stillness Under the Floorboards

It was the stillness that first unsettled me about the unit on Hemlock Lane, not the peace we’d hoped for. Our previous flat had been a cacophony of rattling pipes...

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The Static in the Walls

The house on Mallow Lane had always felt like it was holding its breath. I’d moved in three months ago, after Emma had taken the graduate position upstate, and we’d...

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The Last Anchor

I was never a brave child. My mother said I came into the world with my eyes wide and my fists clenched, as if I already knew what waited outside...

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The Rosary in My Teeth

I never believed in ghosts, not really. Growing up in the dusty outskirts of Bakersfield, the only spirits I knew came from a bottle of cheap whiskey my uncle kept...

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The Threshold Keeper

I was thirteen when I first realized the world was not as solid as it seemed. Objects would vanish from my desk, only to reappear in the linen closet a...

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The Sepia Hour

I have never been comfortable with silence. It has a weight, a presence, that most people never notice. But I was born into it, literally. My mother often told me...

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The Creak in the Attic

It was a Friday in late September, a crisp autumn evening that promised nothing but the usual weekend routine. I was thirteen, and every Friday I’d bike over to my...

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The Lira on the Nightstand

My grandmother, whom I called Mémère, was a woman who walked between worlds. She saw the flicker of the departed in the corner of her eye, heard their whispers in...

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The Breadcrumb Trail

I have always been what my grandmother called ‘thin-skinned.’ Not in the way that means easily hurt, but in the way that means I can feel the world pressing in...

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The Salt Wife

The winter had been brutal, not just in weather but in the way it seemed to press against the thin walls of our cottage. We’d moved to the high desert...

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The Pale Door

I never told anyone about the weight. It wasn’t a physical weight, not like carrying a backpack full of books. It was more like the air itself thickened around my...

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The Oven’s Hunger

It was the smell that first told me something was off. Not the usual mustiness of our 1950s brick bungalow in the quiet outskirts of Thunder Bay, but a faint,...

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