Ghost stories from Canada

The Quiet Dial

The house on Cedar Lane sat at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, its pale yellow siding and white trim looking almost cheerful in the summer of 2010. I lived...

Read Story →

The Panel’s Itch

The house on Maple Street never felt wrong to me. It was a 1970s split-level with fake wood paneling in every room and shag carpets that swallowed footsteps. I’d lived...

Read Story →

The Brass Knot

The first time I saw her, I was four, sitting on the braided rug in our new house on Hemlock Lane. The house smelled of old wood and dust, and...

Read Story →

The afternoon commuter train rattled through the city’s underbelly, its fluorescent lights flickering a staccato rhythm against the grime-streaked windows. Maya had chosen a seat near the rear, away from...

Read Story →

The Elevator’s Memory

For three years, I had used the same exit from my aunt’s building, a converted rec center for retired miners. The stairwell was my shortcut, a gray throat of concrete...

Read Story →

The Chittering in the Static

My grandmother’s house sat on the edge of the Alberta prairie, a lonely two-story farmhouse swallowed by wheat fields that shimmered like a golden sea under the endless sky. I...

Read Story →

The Basement Bloom

My name is Elias, and I’ve always had a strange connection to the world around me. Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt things others couldn’t—presences, whispers, a chill...

Read Story →

The Long Way Home

Mara had been on the road for three days, her thin jacket doing little against the biting prairie wind. She’d left the last town after a misunderstanding at a diner,...

Read Story →

The Cistern Beneath the Hall

The locker room at Ridgemont High was a cavern of rust and echoes, tucked beneath the gymnasium where the boiler’s groan threaded through the pipes like a dying animal. We...

Read Story →

The Locked Door and the Pale Child

I never believed in ghosts until the winter I turned seventeen, when my family and I moved into the old Beaumont house on the edge of town. It was a...

Read Story →

The Constant Companion

I’ve always been a magnet for the unsettled. Not the dramatic, head-turning sort of haunting—more like a persistent, low-frequency hum that follows me from one life stage to the next....

Read Story →

The Ogham Stone

The Ogham Stone loomed at the edge of the moor, a weathered monolith carved with spirals and strange, angular script. I had come to this remote corner of the Scottish...

Read Story →

The Night the Dog Spoke My Name

In the quiet town of Ashwick, nestled between the brooding pines and the fog-laden river, nothing much ever happened. The most exciting event was when old Mrs. Gable’s cat got...

Read Story →

The Kitchen Visitor

When I was twelve, we moved into a house that creaked like an old ship. It sat at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by pines that seemed to...

Read Story →

The Salt and the Static

In the summer of 2016, the Colby family returned to their two-story farmhouse after a chimney fire had gutted the ground floor. For eight months, they had lived in a...

Read Story →

The Mirror’s Debt

My name is Maya. My best friend Cora and I met in seventh grade, but we didn’t become inseparable until freshman year. We’d both had our share of odd occurrences...

Read Story →

The Loam Beneath the Linoleum

My name is Elise, and I grew up in a sleepy, rainswept town in the Pacific Northwest called Ponderosa Pines. When I was nine, my parents split, and my dad...

Read Story →

The Carpet’s Crease

Three months into the seasonal absence of my partner, the house began to feel like a held breath. I’d grown accustomed to the silence that followed his departure, the way...

Read Story →

The Red Room’s Reflection

It was the summer I turned thirteen, and my cousin Lila and I were inseparable. That August, our families descended upon my Great-Uncle Harold’s estate in the hills of Vermont,...

Read Story →

The Last Game of Hide and Seek

I never believed in the supernatural, not really. Oh, I’d read the stories and watched the films, but I always found logical explanations. Then my brother Ethan died, and the...

Read Story →

The Differential Equation

It was the Saturday after Valentine’s Day, and the air still smelled of cheap chocolate and regret. I was single, and my friends, in their infinite wisdom, had decided that...

Read Story →

The Stained Glass Loop

I am 17, almost 18, and I have always had a strange connection to the unseen. Growing up in the Laurentians, north of Montreal, I’ve learned to distinguish the whisper...

Read Story →

The Faded Photograph

I never believed in ghosts until I inherited my grandfather’s old camera. It was a battered vintage Leica, the kind that required you to manually advance the film and fiddle...

Read Story →

The Ginger Gatekeeper

The first time I saw the ginger tom, he was a smear of flame against the rain-slicked asphalt of Cedar Lane, slipping between the graying picket fences like a rumour....

Read Story →