Ghost stories from Canada

The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

In the sweltering summer of 1997, when I was nine, my father and I left our cramped apartment in the city for a weekend of fishing at a secluded lake...

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The Painted Corner

Our new house in the town of Marrow’s Bend was a fixer-upper, and we knew it. The floors sloped, the windows whistled, and the walls had layers of old wallpaper...

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The Constant Visitor

I was six when I first saw him, standing at the foot of my bed in the old farmhouse my parents rented on the outskirts of Verona, Wisconsin. The moonlight...

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The Migraine Man

Elaine had always been a vivid dreamer. Most nights, her dreams were fleeting, evaporating like mist upon waking. But occasionally, one would cling to her memory with unsettling clarity, every...

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The Void in the Hall

In the autumn of 2010, I was twenty-four and hollowed out. My fiancée, Clara, had left me in April, and by November I had let the world slip into a...

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The Third Shape

We were three months into the lease on the old farmhouse, and the silence had become a fourth roommate. Lena, my wife, said it was the isolation—twenty miles to the...

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The Hollow Ground

I’m twenty-one, and I was born and raised in the quiet farmlands of western Minnesota. It’s the kind of place where the flatness stretches for miles, and the only sound...

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The Rake’s Harvest

I’ve always believed that some places carry a weight you can’t see, a kind of pressure that makes the air thick and your skin crawl. The old Bellamy farm was...

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The Sunlit Strider

It began on a Tuesday, the kind of day when the heat shimmered off the gravel road and the cicadas sang so loud you could feel it in your teeth....

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The Dimmer’s Apprentice

Ten years ago, when my fiancé, Daniel, and I first moved to the coastal town of Port Merrow, we settled into the top floor of a Victorian house that overlooked...

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The Persistent Visitor

Maya and I had been friends since third grade, and our sleepovers were a sacred ritual. That Friday night, we were sprawled on the beanbag chairs in my basement, our...

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The Last Harvest

My father was a quiet man, a farmer who believed in the slow, patient rhythm of the earth. He never raised his voice, never lost his temper, and when I...

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The Iron Box on Hollow Hill

My grandmother kept a locked iron box on the highest shelf of her pantry, painted with a symbol I now recognize as a ward against things that should not be...

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The Keeper of the Static

In the autumn of 2008, I was a nineteen-year-old misfit living in my late grandmother’s house in the outskirts of a dying mill town. The house was a Victorian relic,...

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The Concrete Hollow

My best friend Anya and I were thirteen the summer I finally told her about the house on Mallow Lane. Not the new house, the rental my parents had dragged...

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The Ice-Fisher’s Last Knot

When I was nine, we lived in a small town carved into the side of a mountain, where winter lasted eight months and the fjord froze solid enough to drive...

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The Night Audiologist

My grandmother, Elena, died in her sleep three years ago, in the blue armchair she refused to give up, the one that smelled of lavender and old paper. We kept...

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The Pencil Roll

The first time I heard it, I thought it was a mouse. A dry, skittering sound, like something small and hard rolling across a wooden floor. I was nine, and...

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The Humming Wire

I’ve never been one to chase ghosts or consult mediums. If you asked me last spring, I would have said that the supernatural was a hobby for the lonely or...

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The Coupling Pin

I work as a collections manager at the Meridian Railroad Museum, a sprawling complex of red-brick buildings that once housed the workshops of the Great Northern Railroad. My office is...

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The Looming in the Linen Closet

The Old Mill house sat at the edge of the cranberry bogs, its windows like black eyes staring out over the marsh. I was seven when we moved there, my...

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The Glass Moth

The house on Meridian Lane had always been an oddity to the town of Ashford. It wasn’t the oldest, nor the grandest, but it possessed a certain quiet menace that...

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The Concrete Orchard

The day we moved into the old farmhouse on Marrow Lane, the moving truck had barely shuddered to a halt before I felt it. I was nine, and my brother...

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