NEARLY HALF OF CANADIANS BELIEVE IN GHOSTS: New Survey Reveals Paranormal Reality

A new study uncovers what Canadians really believe about ghosts, cryptids, and the unexplained.

Canada sits at a crossroads. Religion fades from daily life, science commands respect, and yet something strange persists in the minds of millions. The paranormal refuses to vanish into the modern age.

The Numbers Tell a Different Story

Two sociologists at the University of British Columbia decided in summer 2025 that they’d had enough of the questionable paranormal polls that pop up every Halloween. Dr. Tony Silva and Dr. Emily Huddart weren’t interested in the usual convenience samples or online questionnaires that news outlets cite. They wanted legitimate scientific data, so they did something Canada hadn’t seen in twenty years: they randomly selected participants from across the entire Canadian population, creating results that actually represented the country rather than just whoever felt like clicking on an internet survey.

Their findings landed somewhere between expected and startling. Forty-four percent of Canadians believe in at least one paranormal phenomenon. Not a vague “maybe” or “I’m open to it” – actual belief. And one in four Canadians report they’ve had direct encounters with spirits. These aren’t numbers from a fringe community or a specific region. This is nearly half the country.

The researchers didn’t limit themselves to ghosts. They asked about alien visitations, psychic abilities, telekinesis, and astrology. They explored Canadian-specific cryptids, creatures embedded in the nation’s folklore. The Cadborosaurus, a massive serpentine sea monster reportedly lurking off the British Columbia coast. The Ogopogo in Lake Okanagan. Both creatures trace their roots back to First Nations folklore, stories that existed long before European settlers arrived with their own interpretations.

The comparative numbers add context. In the United States and United Kingdom, roughly 72 percent of people believe in paranormal phenomena. Canada’s 44 percent seems restrained by comparison. When Silva and Huddart included people who marked themselves as “neutral” about paranormal phenomena – neither believing nor disbelieving – the picture changed. Only about one-quarter of Canadians firmly rejected all paranormal beliefs. The rest kept the door open, whether slightly ajar or wide.

Breaking Down the Believers

Women proved more likely than men to believe in ghosts and psychics. The pattern reflects a documented tendency: women show higher rates of openness to phenomena with spiritual dimensions. Education played a role too. People with bachelor’s degrees or higher showed less belief in most paranormal phenomena, though the researchers noted this didn’t eliminate belief entirely – just reduced it.

Race and ethnicity created surprisingly few differences in belief patterns. The survey revealed one demographic finding that caught the researchers off guard: people aged 19 to 29 showed notably less belief in many paranormal phenomena than those aged 30 to 44 or 45 to 64. The youngest adults weren’t just skeptical of ghosts or UFOs – they appeared to be opting out of non-scientific belief systems entirely, whether religious or paranormal.

Silva and Huddart suggested this might reflect deeper secularization among younger Canadians. Or the pattern could shift as they age and accumulate life experiences that challenge their worldview. The data offers a snapshot, not a prediction.

Language created one specific difference: francophones proved less likely to believe in Sasquatch than anglophones. Why Sasquatch specifically and not other cryptids? The survey doesn’t answer that question. Regional differences otherwise remained minimal across provinces and territories.

When it came to ranking paranormal phenomena by belief, ghostly hauntings topped every category. Canadians found ghosts more credible than any other unexplained phenomenon the survey covered.

When the Dead Come Calling

About one-quarter of Canadians claim they’ve heard, seen, or felt a ghost or spirit. The experiences varied wildly in context and meaning. Some encounters connected to religious frameworks, particularly people reporting they’d felt the Christian Holy Spirit during worship or prayer. More often, encounters tied directly to the death of someone they loved.

One survey participant described waking suddenly after their mother had died. She stood beside the bed, fully visible. She smiled at them. Then she faded away, dissolving like morning fog. The person didn’t describe terror or confusion. They used the word “comforted.” The experience brought peace rather than fear, a final moment of connection before permanent separation.

Other reports centered on specific locations rather than people. A motel manager saw a ghostly figure walking along an upper balcony of the property. They asked locals about it, expecting to be dismissed or laughed at. Instead, people confirmed that a house had stood on that exact spot before the motel existed. The house burned down. A man had lived inside when it happened.

These accounts follow patterns familiar to anyone who studies paranormal experiences. Ghosts appear most often in contexts loaded with emotional significance – grief, loss, unfinished business. They manifest in places with violent or tragic histories. The encounters feel personal and meaningful to those who experience them, regardless of what explanations skeptics might offer.

Cryptid sightings occurred far less frequently than ghost encounters, but the ones reported carried their own unsettling qualities. One participant had been operating a high-clearance sprayer in a 1,300-acre field. The machine’s cab sat ten feet off the ground, giving them an elevated view of the landscape. They came around a bluff and saw something that shouldn’t exist: a blurry, bipedal creature covered in fur. It had a long snout and arms that hung too far down its body. And then, in less time than it takes to process what you’re seeing, it transformed into a moose.

The witness still has no explanation. They don’t claim to know what happened. They just know what they saw, and it doesn’t fit into any category their mind can process. That uncertainty, that gap between experience and explanation, defines so many paranormal encounters.

Monsters in the Deep

The Cadborosaurus and Ogopogo aren’t new inventions designed to boost tourism. They represent deeply rooted Canadian cryptid traditions that predate modern marketing by centuries. The Cadborosaurus takes its name from Cadboro Bay near Victoria, British Columbia. Pre-contact local artifacts suggest indigenous peoples knew about something in those waters. Hundreds of eyewitness reports accumulated over decades. Authenticated photographs exist of a carcass that matches some descriptions of the creature.

People who claim to have seen Cadborosaurus describe a massive snake-like body with a horse-shaped head. Some reports mention antlers. Skeptics point to more mundane explanations: pipefish, seals, even swimming deer spotted from a distance and misidentified through the distortion of water and light. The reports continue regardless, adding to an archive of sightings that spans generations.

The Ogopogo received its colonial name in 1924, though First Nations peoples had been describing the creature for far longer. The Syilx people call it n’ha-a-itk, pronounced “n-ha-ha-it-koo.” They don’t view it as a monster or even as an endangered animal. To the Syilx, n’ha-a-itk represents the spirit of Lake Okanagan itself. They traditionally make offerings to n’ha-a-itk, thanking it for the lake’s bounty and asking for safe passage across the water. Some members of the Syilx community believe the “monster” narrative came from early Christian missionaries who witnessed these rituals and misunderstood their purpose entirely. The settlers who colonized the area adopted this misinterpretation, and suddenly a sacred spirit became a lake monster.

Lake Okanagan stretches 127.1 kilometers with a maximum depth of 232.3 meters and an average depth of 75.9 meters. That’s deep enough to conceal something large if it wanted to stay hidden. People who report seeing the Ogopogo describe a serpentine creature with smooth dark skin. Its body exceeds the thickness of a telephone pole. Estimates put its length at up to 15 meters.

The creature reportedly moves through the water with vertical undulations, coiling its body and propelling itself with a powerful tail. Its head has been variously described as resembling a horse, a snake, or a sheep. Some historical accounts from Syilx sources mention deer-like antlers, emphasizing the creature’s spiritual nature rather than its physical form.

In 1926, dozens of people gathered near Okanagan Mission beach witnessed something together. They saw serpentine humps rising from the lake’s surface. The creature appeared dark and long, with multiple humps moving steadily through the water about 100 meters offshore. Mass sightings like this carry more weight than individual reports because they eliminate the possibility of a single person’s misperception or fabrication.

Art Folden captured footage in 1968 while driving on Highway 97. He noticed something moving in the lake, pulled off the road, and filmed what he believed was the creature. The footage shows a large wake moving across the water. Folden estimated the Ogopogo was 100 meters offshore. Computer analysis later concluded the footage showed a solid, three-dimensional object. What that object actually was remains disputed.

In the 1980s, local tourism agencies offered cash rewards for proven sightings of the beast. Greenpeace got involved, announcing that the Ogopogo should only be filmed, never captured. They listed it as an endangered species, applying conservation logic to a creature whose existence remained unproven.

Two Decades of Change

The last representative Canadian paranormal survey ran twenty years before this one. Between 2005 and 2025, Canada underwent massive social shifts. Media landscapes transformed as social media replaced traditional news sources for many people. Political climates changed, with polarization increasing and trust in institutions fluctuating. Technology fundamentally reshaped how people communicate, access information, and form communities around shared beliefs.

Silva and Huddart wanted to understand how these changes affected belief in what science cannot explain. They also wanted to know whether Canada’s increasing secularization meant paranormal beliefs would decrease, increase, or simply shift into new forms.

Silva later stated he actually expected belief levels to be higher than 44 percent. The research team plans to repeat the survey in several years to track whether beliefs rise, decline, or remain stable. They’re particularly interested in the youngest demographic. Will people currently aged 19 to 29 maintain their skepticism as they age, or will life experiences – deaths of loved ones, unexplainable moments, encounters with the uncanny – shift their perspectives?

The survey’s funding came from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, but only for the first wave, which focused on politics and decarbonization. No grant money or taxpayer funds supported the second wave that included paranormal belief questions. The researchers conducted that portion independently. Participation remained confidential throughout, allowing people to answer honestly without concern about how their responses might affect them socially or professionally.

The final sample included approximately 1,100 Canadians chosen through random selection. The researchers continue analyzing the personal stories participants shared in open-ended questions. Those narratives offer insight into how people create meaning from experiences that mainstream society often dismisses or ridicules.

Science and the Supernatural

Canada ranks as one of the world’s most secular societies. Religion has little influence on how most people act or view the world. Church attendance continues declining. Religious affiliation on census forms drops with each passing decade. Young Canadians show particularly low rates of religious participation.

Given these trends, studying paranormal beliefs might seem frivolous or niche. Most social scientists don’t consider it important enough to warrant serious academic attention. Gathering representative data in Canada also costs substantial money, especially when research must be conducted in both English and French to capture the country’s linguistic diversity. These two factors – lack of academic interest and high costs – meant Canadian paranormal beliefs went unexamined by rigorous methods for two decades.

Silva and Huddart’s survey revealed something that challenges simple narratives about secularization. While many Canadians have replaced or supplemented religious belief with paranormal belief, the vast majority still trust science. Believing in ghosts or aliens doesn’t mean rejecting vaccines, evolution, or climate science. The relationship between paranormal belief and scientific thinking isn’t binary or oppositional.

Canadians who hold paranormal beliefs tend to view them as addressing phenomena that science hasn’t explained yet rather than phenomena that science has disproven. They’re not anti-science. They’re claiming space for experiences and possibilities that current scientific frameworks don’t adequately address.

This distinction matters. It suggests that paranormal belief in a modern, secular society doesn’t represent a retreat from rationality or a rejection of empirical thinking. It represents a recognition that human experience sometimes exceeds the boundaries of what science can currently measure, test, or explain.

The researchers weren’t trying to prove or disprove any paranormal phenomenon. Their goal was to understand what these beliefs mean for individuals and for Canadian society as a whole. The data shows that as Canada becomes more secular, spiritual and supernatural beliefs haven’t disappeared. They’ve simply detached from organized religion and attached themselves to individual experiences and personal interpretations.

What the Data Reveals

The survey demonstrates that paranormal belief isn’t fringe behavior in Canada. It’s mainstream. Nearly half the country believes in at least one phenomenon science can’t explain. One in four people report direct encounters with spirits. These aren’t people who’ve rejected modernity or scientific thinking. They’re people who’ve had experiences that don’t fit into materialist frameworks.

The ghost standing beside the bed after a mother’s death. The motel manager seeing a figure walk through a space where someone burned to death decades earlier. The farmer watching something bipedal transform into a moose in an empty field. These experiences feel real to the people who have them, and the prevalence of similar reports across cultures and throughout history suggests they tap into something fundamental about human consciousness and perception.

Whether that fundamental element points to actual supernatural entities or to how human brains process grief, fear, and the unknown remains an open question. The survey doesn’t answer it. The survey simply documents that these beliefs and experiences persist in a wealthy, educated, secular nation in the 21st century.

The paranormal makes for entertaining conversation around Halloween, when ghost stories and monster movies dominate popular culture. For millions of Canadians, it functions as part of their everyday belief system. Ghosts exist in the same mental space as family, memory, and grief. Cryptids lurk in lakes where people swim and fish. The unexplained hasn’t vanished from Canadian consciousness as religion declined. It’s found new forms, new contexts, new ways of manifesting in a secular age.

Silva and Huddart’s research provides a baseline. The next survey, whenever it happens, will show whether these patterns strengthen, weaken, or evolve. Whether younger Canadians maintain their skepticism or develop their own relationships with the paranormal as they age. Whether new technologies and media environments push paranormal beliefs further into mainstream acceptance or finally erode them entirely.

The data speaks clearly: Canada may be secular, but it’s far from purely rational. Something moves beneath the surface of everyday life. Spirits visit the grieving. Creatures swim in deep lakes. The dead sometimes refuse to stay gone. And nearly half the country believes it.

References

* New research reveals that almost half of Canadians believe in the paranormal — ghosts and all
* Ghosts, aliens and Sasquatch: What Canadians believe in—and what they don’t
* Cadborosaurus the Canadian sea serpent
* Cryptozoology
* Ogopogo – Wikipedia
* Creepy Myths From Canada That’ll Keep You Up At Night

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.