John Robert Colombo - The Big Book of Canadian Ghost Stories

THE BIG BOOK OF CANADIAN GHOST STORIES

Other Books of Canadian Mysteries by J.R. Colombo

They are the best collections of their kind being produced by anyone, anywhere, as far as I can see. (Hilary Evans)

Strange but True (Hounslow / Dundurn, 2007)

More True Canadian Ghost Stories (Prospero, 2005)

Terrors of the Night (Hounslow / Dundurn, 2005)

The Monster Book of Canadian Monsters (BSDB, 2004)

True Canadian UFO Stories (Prospero, 2004)

The Midnight Hour (Hounslow / Dundurn, 2004)

True Canadian Ghost Stories (Prospero, 2003)

Many Mysteries (C&C, 2001)

Ghost Stories of Canada (Hounslow / Dundurn, 2000)

Ghosts in Our Past (C&C, 2000)

Weird Stories (C&C, 1999)

The UFO Quote Book (C&C, 1999)

Mysteries of Ontario (Hounslow / Dundurn, 1999)

Singular Stories (C&C, 1999)

Three Mysteries of Nova Scotia (C&C, 1999)

The UFO Quote Book (C&C, 1999)

Closer than You Think (C&C, 1998)

Marvellous Stories (C&C, 1998)

Haunted Toronto (Hounslow / Dundurn, 1996)

Ghost Stories of Ontario (Hounslow / Dundurn, 1995)

Strange Stories (C&C, 1994)

Singular Stories (C&C, 1994)

Ghosts Galore! (C&C, 1994)

Close Encounters of the Canadian Kind (C&C, 1994)

Voices of Rama (C&C, 1994)

The Mystery of the Shaking Tent (C&C, 1993)

Dark Visions (Hounslow / Dundurn, 1992)

The Little Book of UFOs (Pulp Press, 1992)

UFOs over Canada (Hounslow / Dundurn, 1991)

Mackenzie Kings Ghost (Hounslow / Dundurn, 1991)

Mysterious Encounters (Hounslow / Dundurn, 1990)

Extraordinary Experiences (Hounslow / Dundurn, 1989)

Mysterious Canada (Doubleday, 1988)

Windigo (Western Producer Prairie Books, 1982)

Colombos Book of Marvels (NC Press, 1979)

John Robert Colombo

Copyright John Robert Colombo, 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Copy-editor: Allison Hirst

Proofreader: Jason Karp

Designer: Erin Mallory

Printer: Transcontinental

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Colombo, John Robert, 1936

The big book of Canadian ghost stories / John Robert Colombo.

ISBN 978-1-55002-844-7

1. Ghosts--Canada. 2. Haunted places--Canada. I. Title.

BF1472.C3C575 2008 133.10971 C2008-903780-4

1 2 3 4 5 12 11 10 09 08

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

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Our formulations of the regularities of nature are surely dependent on how the brain is built, but also, and to a significant degree, on how the universe is built.

For myself, I like a universe that includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence.

Carl Sagan, astronomer and author,
Can We Know the Universe? Reflections on a Grain of Salt,
Brocas Brain (1979)

The Big Book of Canadian Ghost Stories is the most extensive collection ever published of accounts of encounters with ghosts and spirits in this country. As such it is a weighty and a creepy collection!

In these pages you will find close to two hundred narratives most of them frightening, all of them perplexing of the supernatural, the psychical, and the paranormal. Many of these accounts are reprinted from the columns of old newspapers and magazines; many of them appear in the words of the witnesses themselves and have never before been reprinted. The stories contributed by journalists excel in atmosphere and are meant to frighten readers. The stories related in the first-person singular by eyewitnesses to the events themselves offer readers a particular sense of verisimilitude: These things happened to me! All of them are gripping to read.

These accounts of strange events come from the archives that I have been maintaining now for more than thirty years. The items that I have collected originate in a number of sources, including wide reading of the periodical press; nineteenth-century newspapers and journals; popular books and scholarly texts; websites devoted to such subjects as superstitions, psychical research, and parapsychology; personal correspondence, originally in the form of letters, now mainly email; and, finally, face-to-face encounters and on-site investigation. Later on I will discuss some of the characteristics of these stories, these narratives. Here I will add but a few words on the sources of the present narratives and the principles behind their organization.

About two-thirds of the stories in this jumbo collection are the most popular ones that originally appeared in the earlier collections that I complied over two decades. The first compilation was Extraordinary Experiences and it appeared in the year 1989; thirty-odd collections later, there appeared Strange but True in 2007. I have selected the most vivid of these ghost stories from these collections, reluctantly excluding eyewitness sightings of lake monsters, sea serpents, and creatures of the woodlands, not to mention descriptions of eerie happenings, peculiar coincidences, strange powers, and seemingly miraculous cures. (Maybe I will be able to publish accounts of these in another Big Book in the future.) Also excluded for good measure are sightings of flying saucers or unidentified flying objects, of alien beings from other planets in our solar system, in our galaxy, or in other dimensions of time and space. Still, at the same time, I have included a dozen or so stories which, while not specifically ghost stories, nonetheless are accounts that will be of interest to readers of such stories, for they retain the creepy atmosphere and leave the reader in a state of puzzlement. What remains are very human accounts of the reactions of men and women to inexplicable visions of ghosts and spirits.