Ghost stories from Canada

The Mirror in the Hall

I never believed in doppelgangers until the summer I turned sixteen, when they started appearing in the most ordinary places. The first time, I was in my apartment, alone, sorting...

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The Spinning Blade

The afternoon sun slanted through the blinds of the duplex in Lubbock, Texas, casting a grid of light across the kitchen linoleum. My sister-in-law, Clara, was loading the dishwasher while...

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The Third Candle

The night we broke the rules, the house on Hemlock Lane became a mausoleum of memories that didn’t belong to us. My cousin Jenna and her boyfriend Marcus had insisted...

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The Second Floor Landing

My grandmother’s farmhouse sat at the end of a gravel road, its white paint peeling like sunburned skin. We visited every summer, and I knew every creak and shadow. But...

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The Last March of the Tin Men

My great-uncle, Edgar, was a man of rigid routines and iron discipline. After thirty years as a master sergeant in the Navy, he retired to a small coastal town in...

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The Lantern Man of Hollow Creek Road

In the small town of Millbrook, nestled between endless cornfields and the winding Blackwater River, there was a stretch of old logging road known only as Hollow Creek Road. Locals...

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The Midnight Reflection

I never believed in ghosts, not really. They were just stories told to scare children, or excuses for creaky floors and drafty windows. But what happened that night in my...

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The Perfume of Grief

Marlene had never believed in ghosts, not really. She was a practical woman, a retired nurse who had seen enough death to know that the body was just a vessel....

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The Last Radio Static

The summer my mother died, the air in our small coastal town of Portharrow smelled of salt and decaying seaweed. Her name was Elara, and she had been a woman...

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The Chalk Line

My name is Mara, and I was fourteen when the nights changed. My mother, Rosa, kept a locked drawer in her dresser, but the key hid under her pillow. She...

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The Yellow Bloom

In the summer of 1975, sixteen-year-old Eleanor lived with her family in the dusty, sun-scorched town of Cinder, New Mexico. Their house sat at the edge of town, just past...

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The Damp Stairwell

My grandmother’s house sat at the edge of a dying mill town, where the fog rolled in off the river and never quite left. The house itself was a Victorian...

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The Charcoal Room

My friends, Elias and Nora, had a son, Samuel, who was born too early and too small. The doctors diagnosed him with a rare skeletal disorder that left his tiny...

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The Lace Curtain of 312

My obsession with spectral history had always been a family affair. Every Sunday, my Aunt Delia would lay out sepia-toned photographs on the dining table, her voice a graveyard whisper...

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The Fourth Wall

It was the summer I turned twenty-three, and I had just moved into the top floor of a dilapidated Victorian house on the edge of a dying mill town. The...

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The Cartographer’s Burden

Elena had always loved her grandfather’s old farmhouse, perched on the edge of a town so small it barely merited a dot on any map. But when her friend Marcus...

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The Glass Jars

The glass jars lined the pantry shelves like small, silent prisoners. Each one held a different kind of dried herb or seed, labeled in my mother’s flowing script, but the...

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Something Following Me? Poltergeist? Doppelganger?

Soooo, where to begin? I’m going to apologize in advance for the length. I’ll begin by saying that I moved to my apartment in a historical district of a very...

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The Stucco Pellet

The first time I noticed something wrong in the house on Maple Street, it was the basement. We had moved in during the spring of ’97, into a neat two-story...

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The Cellar’s Guest

My grandmother left me her farmhouse, a sprawling Victorian relic tucked into the Oregon woods, along with a cellar that had been sealed for as long as I could remember....

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The Seventh Step

I never trusted the old farmhouse, not from the moment we pulled up the gravel drive. My grandparents had left it to my parents when they passed, and we were...

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The Cartographer’s Journal

In the remote town of Ashford, nestled in the Appalachian Mountains, 28-year-old Mara Lyle had just discovered she was pregnant. It was October 3rd, and the autumn leaves were turning...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

I never believed in the supernatural, not really. My name is Eleanor, and I’m a practical woman, a nurse by trade. I’ve seen the body fail and the mind slip,...

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The Cardboard Box

I met Mara at a temp agency when I was nineteen, a wiry girl with a penchant for thrift-store sweaters and a laugh that didn’t quite match the look in...

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