John Robert Colombo - Jeepers Creepers: Canadian Accounts of Weird Events and Experiences

This Happened to Me This Week

Ray Amell

I received a quite interesting email from Ray Amell, a reader of my books who lives in Brockville, Ontario. It was dated August 27, 2009, and it concerned a series of serendipitous events about a genealogical search and headstones in graveyards. I was intrigued. Here is what Mr. Amell wrote:

Mr. Colombo,

I have just read True Canadian Ghost Stories and enjoyed it very much. Am looking forward to getting a copy of The Big Book of Canadian Ghost Stories this week, here in Brockville.

I dont know if you are still collecting unusual stories, but this week my wife and I experienced an unusual happening while researching her family tree, looking for headstones on Alumette Island in the Pontiac region of Quebec, across the river from Pembroke, Ontario.

I have written a short sequence of events and would share it with you if you are still collecting such stories. Basically, I have been researching the Howard and Amell families and collecting information on the web, speaking to family members as well as visiting old cemeteries. We (my wife Kathleen and I) visited the cemetery in St. Joseph Parish on the Island this week and found the lost grave marker of my wifes grandparents (Howard) by a very strange sequence of events. The incident occurred on day special to a family member who had passed away. The Howards had migrated from Ireland during the potato famine in 184546 and settled on the Island.

If you are still collecting, let me know and I will forward my story to you

Naturally, I responded to Mr. Amell right away, assuring him that I was still collecting ghost stories and asking him to send me his account. When it arrived the next day, it bore the title This Happened to Me This Week, Aug. 25, 2009.

His account will be of particular interest to everyone who has conducted research, especially genealogical research. Incidents like the coincidences described here do happen, and they happen quite often, so often, in fact, that the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung created a term to describe them. He called such incidents synchronicities events with no known or possible causal relationship that do occur and seem to be more than casual! Coincidence? Good luck? Happy chance? The luck of the Irish?

Believe it or not, this is how it happened.

This week we were in Pembroke and Alumette Island, in the Pontiac region of Quebec where the Howard clan settled after their arrival in Canada about 1846. I was searching for the grave marker of Thomas and Bridget Howard in St. Joseph Parish on the Island.

I had searched the web on ancestry.ca and other sites for old headstones marking graves of Howard and Amell ancestries. The headstone I found was labelled Howard Thomas and Bridget and sons Patrick and Maurice. It was labelled as being in St. Joseph Cemetery in St. Joseph Parish.

On Monday we arrived on the Island and visited the St. Joseph Cemetery in the company of one of Kathleens relatives Donna T., who lives near the graveyard and St. Joseph Parish Church.

I took several photographs of a number of headstones that Donna pointed out for my family-tree project.

I asked about a headstone for Thomas and Bridget. Donna said that she had never seen one in that cemetery or in any other cemetery on the Island. I showed her the picture from the Net and she was amazed that it existed. After an extensive search of every marker in the cemetery, with no luck, we left for the day.

On Tuesday morning, August 25, we visited the other cemetery. This one is in Chapeau at the other end of island, at St-Alphonse-de-Liguori Church. I took several other photos but still we had no luck locating the Thomas / Bridget stone.

That afternoon, I visited the office in Pembroke of the Upper Ottawa Valley Genealogical Group. We searched their records much of the afternoon, and I collected and verified some valuable information for my family-tree project. Before we left, I mentioned to one of the folks at the centre that I was searching for this particular headstone. I showed them the picture I had from the Net.

They looked up some old records from the St. Joseph Cemetery and found an entry that matched the names I was looking for. They had surveyed the cemetery some time ago and had recorded listings of various headstones. Finally, after a bit of searching, they told me, Yes there is a grave there and it is somewhere near the markers for Cosgrove and Duff. They were somewhere in the cemetery.

Okay. So we would have to go back and look again. Well, we did. Sure enough, there were the two markers of Cosgrove and Duff. There was nothing but green grass between or near them.

I had a metal detector with me. Out of curiosity, trusting my luck, I walked the area with a very slight hope that I may pick up something that might have been put there with metal in or with it at some time in the past. No luck.

Okay, now comes the part I want to put on paper. Kay witnessed the whole episode.

I started walking from the Duff marker toward the Cosgrove marker. They were about fifty feet apart. About fifteen feet from the Duff marker, I stopped. I didnt know why. There was nothing there but grass. There was a fence nearby.

Something made me stop. It did so not in words, but in thought. For some reason I knelt down and pulled out my pocket knife. It has a three and one-half inch long blade. I started to push it into the ground.

On the second push, it struck something solid. My knife blade scraped it. It felt like I was scratching stone. There was a screeching sound of metal on stone. I started cutting away the sod, which was about three or four inches deep. As I cut away, I could see the top of a flat red-granite headstone as it was being exposed. I kept cutting the sod away, and what was gradually revealed was the headstone of Thomas and Bridget Howard with a notation: and their sons, Patrick and Maurice.

Kay just stood there and couldnt believe what had happened.

I uncovered the complete stone, exposing the writing, and washed it off. It was the stone we were looking for. Identical to photo I had copied from the Web but hidden under a layer of sod and grass so that it was not visible above ground.

Thomas and Bridget were Joseph Francis Howards parents. (Maurice and Patrick were two of his brothers.) This would have been Joes 107th. (He had been born on August 25, 1902.)

Is it not odd that I found his parents headstone on his 107th birthday, to the day, in the way that I did?

Im sure everyone will have his or her own explanation for this one! My own explanation is that it was a cross inter-dimensional / time experience at its best. This is not an exaggeration in any way, and it happened exactly as I have described it.

Her only comment, as she stood there, was, Thank you, Joe, and have a happy birthday.

If you look closely at the picture with the overturned sod exposed, you can see the reverse imprint of the marker writing embedded in the bottom side of the sod that I had removed.

Street Lamp Interference

David Gallinger

I am a long-time subscriber to The Skeptical Inquirer, the journal for critical inquiry that was founded in 1976 in Buffalo, New York. It was published bimonthly by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, a group that shortened its name to Center for Inquiry. Originally, its remit was limited to claims of the paranormal, excluding those of belief systems. By this the editors meant it would study reports of anomalous phenomena, like the basis for The Amityville Horror, sightings of ghosts and flying saucers, accounts of mind reading, claims of cancer cures, and other such oddities. The editors steered clear of organized religion, although there were short news stories about such matters as miraculous visions and miracle cures, and there was always an article or two to debunk believers claims for the antiquity of the Shroud of Turin. In the last decade or so, the editors have put their boxing gloves on and begun to do battle with militant religionists. They have commissioned major examinations of so-called Scientific Creationism, Intelligent Design, the Gaia Hypothesis, Global Warming, the encroachments of religious fundamentalists on individual rights and freedom of expression, and similar subjects.