We recently asked Canadians from the BuzzFeed Community to share their paranormal and creepy encounters with us.
Here are 17 of the most haunting stories that will send shivers down your spine:
1. The Haunted Hospital
Have you ever heard of a little town called Weyburn, Saskatchewan? Well it used to be home to one of the biggest mental health hospitals in Canada. After the 1960s, it was used as a nursing home, then in the late 1990s and early 2000s it was used as offices for Heath Region employees.
My mom worked in there so when I was little, I used to explore the empty halls. You were never alone there. I swear it was one of the most haunted places in Canada. Faucets would be left on, windows opened and closed right in front of you. You could faintly hear tables being dragged across the floor. Ask anyone who lived in Weyburn, they probably have their own story.
The building has been torn down and new houses built over top of the old site. Some people who own new houses claim to hear tables being dragged across their floor even though nobody else is home.
—Submitted by syds4be43769f
2. The Nightmare Nursery
This is not my own story but one an old roommate of mine relayed to me.
Her cousin lived in an old house in Newmarket, Ontario. The layout of the house had the kitchen on the first level, a second level with some bedrooms, and a third level with the nursery and master bedroom.
One day her cousin was in the kitchen washing some dishes while the baby slept upstairs. Suddenly she heard the baby crying over the baby monitor. She dried her hands and climbed the two flights of stairs to the nursery and as she got closer she couldn't hear the baby's cries anymore. When she entered the room, the baby was sound asleep still, with nothing in the room disturbed.
The cousin went back downstairs and checked that the baby monitor was on the right setting, and once she determined it was fine she went back to the dishes. As soon as she turned on the tap, the wailing began again on the baby monitor.
She slowly began her way up the stairs and once more found that the sound of crying stopped the closer she got and that once she entered the room the baby was still fast asleep. She was starting to feel uneasy about the whole situation as she went back to the kitchen. Once more she attempted to start on the dishes when the crying began for the third time.
She went back up the stairs but this time she went quickly, that feeling of unease growing within her. As she reached the third floor landing and turned around the bannister so that the nursery was in sight, she saw the door slam shut; suddenly her baby was crying for real this time, horrific-sounding wails and shrieks. She ran to the door and tried to get it open, but it appeared to be locked even though there was no lock on the door. She slammed her shoulder into the door, trying to get it to open, desperately calling out her infant's name. She backed away from the door with intent to kick it but before she could raise her foot, the door slowly creaked open on its own. She burst into the room, and the baby was in the corner of his crib crying, and the light fixture on the ceiling was spinning in circles. She grabbed her baby and ran downstairs and stayed there until her husband got home.
What makes this story more disturbing to me is that ever since that day her baby sleeps with its eyes open; when she took him to the doctor to find out why, he suggested that some children develop this as a defense mechanism after experiencing a traumatic incident. It leaves you wondering, what happened in that room?
—Submitted by Jackie Harripersad (via Facebook)
3. The Girl Wearing The Fancy-Ass Dress
When I was 6, I randomly woke up in the middle of the night to see a little girl wearing a fancy-ass dress holding a creepy-ass doll, and, of course, she was staring at me.
There was nobody in the house at the time who was younger than I was (or owned fancy clothing like that) so at that age, I did the only logical thing. I hid the fuck under my blankets until I fell asleep again. The thing is, I still live in the same house and sometimes objects will suddenly move or I'll see a figure, but for some reason I feel like I shouldn't leave.
—Submitted by ToxicInsanity
4. The Mysterious Museum
I work at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria and I'm a cleaner. We clean floors completely alone at night, and each person gets a floor to do.
Since I've started, I have heard and seen many weird things. On my first day, as I was cleaning the glass early in the morning on the third floor in the First Peoples Gallery, I heard whispers, footsteps, snapping sounds, all sorts of weird stuff that I assumed was the guards doing their morning rounds. I called down to them and asked if they had someone upstairs, to which they said, "No, but someone will be up there in the next hour or so." I thought it was weird and went to leave.
Walking down the stairs I heard someone running down them behind me. I booked it, I have never ran so fast before in my entire life. I still wanted to prove that I was a good worker so I ran through the galleries on third and kept trying to clean the glass. I felt an awful feeling that someone was watching me.
Just the other week, I was up in third at night, with the backpack-vac on (you can't hear anything over it) and I got into the totem gallery and felt sick. I cleaned it as fast as I could and left; the few shadows moving here and there in the corner of my eyes was a very usual thing up there, and I ignored it. I got into Century Hall and went to start mopping when I heard two women laughing and whispering, I called out "Hello? Anyone there?" and there was nothing. I couldn't see anyone and the laughing stopped. I called security to ask if they had workers in; they said I was alone.
With that floor, if you ever do visit, you will hear many things: We've heard a little girl giggling, we've had reports of seeing a man's face above the blacksmith display, shadows moving in the hotel in Old Town. One of my co-workers said he saw a man in a doctor's uniform, which we believe was Doctor Helmcken.
—Submitted by samifletcher13
5. The Paranormal Piano
My mom recently bought a 150-year-old piano because it was super cheap. One day, my sister and I got home from school and went downstairs to watch TV. Meanwhile, my mom was doing yard work. She suddenly started yelling at us to get upstairs NOW. She sounded mad.
We went to see what was wrong and saw that the piano had been pushed out two feet from the wall. She thought we did it. Mind you, this piano is about 1,000 lbs. We would have trouble moving it ourselves. We assured her we didn't move it. And we should have heard it move across the floor, but we heard nothing. Now there is a huge scratch and dent in our floor. Sometimes random notes will play too.
—Submitted by kirstens488becaa1
6. The Familiar Voice
My great-grandmother passed away in 2006, and after her funeral my whole family was at their house just chatting and doing what people do after funerals. I suddently heard a door creak and then heard my great-grandmother's voice say, "Does anybody want a cup of tea?" That was what she always used to say. I looked up and my mom, aunt, and grandmother were all looking at each other because they had heard it as well.
—Submitted by abbeyf4e4db53a5
7. The Window Wanderer
I lived in a bungalow growing up so my bedroom was on the ground level. I used to sleep with my curtains opened all the time.
One night when I was 4, I woke up and saw a man staring straight into my bedroom. I freaked out and ran into my parents' room screaming. They thought it might be the homeless man who sometimes walks around our neighbourhood, but after checking, no one was found near the house.
My mom then asked me to describe the man and I did, in perfect detail. My mom went and dug through some old photos and pulled out a photo of her grandfather who had passed away when she was just a kid. She asked me, "Is this the man that was looking at you?" And I lost my shit and started crying and screaming, "Yes, that's the scary man!"
—Submitted by jocelynr4f9fbe65d
8. The Ouija Board Request
My friends and I tried out a new Ouija board. We were talking to some 5-year-old girl named "D" and she kept asking us to kill her mama for her.
—Submitted by joeys4920899cb
9. The Woman In Black
I lead Ghostly Gastown tours in Vancouver, a ghost tour where we walk around historic Gastown and tell the local stories and history. The great (though occasionally terrifying) thing about the tour is that it's super casual so we don't have any jump scares or anything set up to freak you out. This can be really creepy as a guide though as any experiences that happen on the tour are usually the real deal. And, trust me, there have been a bunch, but there's one spot we go to that is particularly freaky.
There's this side alley that we go down that leads to a bigger alley, haunted by the Woman in Black. Without spoiling the story I'll just say a woman in a long, old, black dress appears at one end of the alley and floats through to the gate at the other side, clutching at her belly. Again, not spoiling, but the clutching of the belly is believed to be very important to her tale.
Now here's the creepy part. During about a third of the tours I do, as soon as we turn down the alley, one of the women in the group grabs her stomach or starts feeling nauseous. I've even had people have to sit down. This is before I've even told any bit of the story. I've also seen a black shadow, like the hem of a skirt, float around the corner where we're heading, always gone by the time the tour files in.
—Submitted by JeSuisUnAnanas
10. The Ticking Watch
A couple of weeks after my dad died, I had a really bad night. I was up crying and was a mess.
All of a sudden, at 3am, my dad's watch went off. and it scared the bejesus out of me. He worked shift work my whole life, so it wasn't an unusual sound for me to hear that early. It actually made me feel peaceful.
As I was calming down and getting close to sleep, I heard my father's voice saying, "Don't worry, I just have to go to work" from the next room over, which is my parents' and was empty at the time.
I never have auditory hallucinations, no matter how tired I am. It was soothing, for one last time, to hear his voice. And I'll go to my grave swearing that it was his; no one else was on that floor with me, and no men were in the house.
—Submitted by waspxiii
11. The Perfect Circle
One night I was at my high school, which was over 100 years old, and I was leaving really late after practice with my friend, when we ran into a teacher. We started talking and she had an exercise ball that she placed on the floor while we talked.
As we talked, we watched that ball roll around us in a perfect circle without anyone having touched it. After we watched it roll in the circle a few times, the teacher grabbed it and we left as a group. After that, I never left through the old part of the school that late again.
—Submitted by ashleet4051304e1
12. The Lighthouse
While sleeping on Centre Island as a volunteer for an art festival, a group of friends and I decided to walk to Hanland's Point, an island that has a lighthouse and is rumoured to be haunted.
Once we got to the lighthouse (in all its creepy glory with the doors bolted shut with what looked like an old Victorian lock), we decided to share our personal creepiest stories. Halfway through the storytelling though, we heard a woman's screams coming from inside the lighthouse and in the bushes around us. We hightailed it out of that place, and, with Centre Island's lights all out for the night, we walked back in complete darkness save for the small flashlight on a friend's phone.
—Submitted by Anna Du (via Facebook)
13. The Horrifying Dream Home
My family and I moved into our dream home 18 years ago, when I was 10. Our move was delayed as the owners' daughter suddenly and mysteriously died in the house, so they asked for extra time.
We had to live in a trailer park for the summer as our home had already sold. When we moved in, our happy family life descended into pure chaos. People began phoning the house saying they were going to kill my mother, my sister, and I.
I began having extreme nightmares so bad that I couldn't go to school the next day, doors and cabinets would open and close, lights would go on and off, and we'd hear strange noises and see strange things.
One day my mom saw a man walk through the house and down into a room in the basement – my bedroom. She began telling my sister and I about the man she saw right before we were having priests coming to pray over the house and anoint it with oil.
What's crazy and scary is that at that moment my mother and sister began describing the exact same man to each other at the same time, as my sister had apparently seen him too. It's not like my mom described him first and my sister said, "I saw him too!" They were finishing each other's sentences while describing him. My mom said she was so terrified when she saw him that she made my stepdad go through the house with a baseball bat.
Not only that, but my sister was in the garage one day when an axe that was tucked away in a crack in the wall of the garage came barreling down on her, missing her by a couple of inches. Another night, we were home alone and heard a crash downstairs. We mustered up the courage to investigate and all the fire pokers had been pulled out of the fire poker stand (you have to pull them up and out to get them out) and were laying on the floor but the stand was still upright. Needless to say, praying over the house and anointing it with oil – several different times – did not work. We moved.
—Submitted by missyd4
14. The Bedside Visitor
When I was going to university at the Laurier campus in Brantford, Ontario, I lived in an old wartime house several blocks from the school. Around Halloween, I came down with the flu and was incredibly ill.
I was bed-ridden for nearly a week and woke several times to find an elderly man at the side of my bed, watching me sleep. The weird thing was that I wasn't scared in the slightest. I asked him what he was doing once and he said, "Just checking to make sure you're OK." I fell back asleep immediately afterward and never saw him again once I was better.
—Submitted by lauriej4c1dbc119
15. The Uninvited Party Guest
I held a party in a wooded area once. We set up chairs facing a TV, which we had a karaoke machine plugged into. It was a very memorable night for everyone, but a little bit more memorable for my buddy and me.
I ended up falling asleep on some chairs a few rows back from the TV; it was around 3:45am when I was awakened by my buddy who was calling out my name from afar. Still a bit hazy and half asleep – I slowly got up and noticed there was a shadowy figure of a woman sitting in the seat facing the TV in front of where I had lain down. I invited her to come with us, but my friend insisted that I come to him and to fall asleep at his place instead. I figured it would been all right. The girl was probably asleep and had some friends nearby. So I slowly walked toward my friend and eventually fell asleep at his house.
Come morning, I had been woken up by the voices of my friends, so I got up to see them sitting in the kitchen, and I remembered the woman from last night. I asked my friend about her and asked what had happened to her.
What he told me is something I'd never ever forget. He said, "Man, I saw her too. I didn't want to come closer 'cause what I saw was a woman sitting straight up in front of you, with no face, and dressed in black."
—Submitted by harwinj
And here are a couple less-paranormal-but-equally-terrifying Canadian stories:
16. The Chilling Experience
I was outside our house at that time. I was waiting for my mom. Then suddenly, I felt a cold, icy thing in my back. I slowly turned and there was nothing. And it happened again, on my shoulder this time. That's when I realized that it was snowing.
—Submitted by felicityangelaf
17. The Realest Canadian Horror Story
I opened my phone and there was 1% battery and no Wi-Fi.
—Submitted by chrisp4702cbe89
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.