Algonquin Park, Spirits at Play

A Preamble Tale

Our family has been Ontario's Algonquin Park campers for many years. Since our boys were in their early teens, we have canoed on many of the fabulously scenic park lakes..... but our favorites have always been Canoe Lake, Tea Lake and Rock Lake. As an ongoing researcher somewhat obsessed with the alleged drowning death of Canadian artist Tom Thomson, I have spent my vacations close to Canoe Lake (for study) where his body was found in the early summer of 1917. I believe it was murder. I will deal with this down the road in my blog collection.

One evening at Rock Lake, as my wife and son Andrew were sitting down at the campground's beachfront, adjacent to the famous Booth Trail, they watched in the low light of autumn dusk, a man walk through the shoreline area, down onto the beach, stop momentarily, and then walk into the water. He hadn't taken many steps into the lake when he simply vanished. A ghost? An apparition? A message to the living from someone who has passed? Who can say?

It was only a short time before this holiday weekend for us, that a gent had perished in a canoe mishap a short distance from this camping area, being found on the other side of the bay several days after he went missing. Could it have been the image of the chap repeating the events of that fateful night. This is an example of the kind of encounters our family has had, and never discounted, over the past twenty five years. We don't over analyze these events and we certainly aren't frightened when something similar happens in our day to day activities. We are open-minded to such interactions but we don't make any attempt to draw spirits into our domain, or hope to make any particular connections with the other side. If it happens, well, it happens, and we appreciate the opportunity to experience something a tad outside simple explanation.

Our many parallel encounters certainly won't make the next thriller movie out of Hollywood and I don't believe there's one story here that would be the spark for an author to embellish into fiction. These are just honest, non-sensational recollections of personal experiences with unknown entities that may abut or prutrude a tad into the true definition of paranormal. Yet the fact of their commonplace may validate your own encounters that you may or may not have dismissed as something unworthy of after-thought. Then this is for you......not stories to frighten.....rather accounts to enlighten. Please read on!

*Ghosts of Muskoka and Algonquin Park, A Few Other Wee Beasties And Tales Of Our Own Haunted Sleepy Hollow

Note: The material being published here was prepared in the spring and early summer of 2008 and it may repeat (duplicate) some information and story-lines from the editorial copy first published in mid September to launch this blog-site. There was a several month hiatus period between the original copy and the introductory material written much later.

A wee biographical note about the author of this blog-site

Ted Currie is a well known writer-historian who has lived in the Muskoka region since 1966, when his family moved from Southern Ontario, Burlington specifically, to a new home in the Town of Bracebridge, about 100 plus miles north of Toronto. He graduated York Unversity in Toronto, in 1977 with a degree in Canadian history, and in the same year began organization work to create the Bracebridge Historical Society, which later was the supporting organization of Woodchester Villa and Museum, a restored octagonal home on a hillside overlooking the cataract of Bracebridge Falls. Woodchester Villa, or the Bird House as it is better known, is one of the old haunts that will be profiled in this blog collection over the next year.

A prolific writer, Currie is a past editor/reporter for many of Muskoka's well known weekly and summer publications from 1979, and he currently authors a well read column in a publication known as "Curious - The Tourist Guide." He is a long time old book collector-dealer and has an online business known as Birch Hollow Antiques. He has written numerous books and hundreds of full-length feature articles based on local/ regional Ontario history, and is best known for his series of articles published in a variety of newspapers on the mysterious death of Canadian artist, Tom Thomson, on Algonquin Park's Canoe Lake in 1917. Currie has long claimed Thomson was the victim of foul play which contradicts the official cause of death listed by the coroner following a brief inquest. The coroner then had ruled (without ever examining the body) that Thomson had died by misadventure, the cause being accidental drowning. There will be references made to Thomson's death later in this series of columns.

He has in the past, been the co-ordinator of an Ontario government funded project for the former Muskoka Board of Education (Experience '78), which compiled tape recorded interviews of many of Muskoka's oldest citizens....a resource collection still in use in 2008 within the Trillium Lakelands Board area. His profile of Muskoka artist Robert Emerson Everett is included in the resource collection of both the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) and the National Art Gallery, in Ottawa. Ted was the first Muskoka historian to complete a lengthy essay, funded by the Provincial Government, detailing the Icelandic Emigration to Canada, and the District of Muskoka in the 1870's, and his work has been translated to Icelandic for re-publication. His books and articles can be found in part in the collections of many regional libraries, catalogued in their respective Muskoka resources.

He most recently retired, after 12 years service, as curator of the Bracebridge Sports Hall of Fame exhibition and archives, at the town's Memorial Arena, which he initiated in co-operation with the Crozier Foundation for youth, which was officially launched in 1996 by former hometowner and National Hockey League all star goaltender, Roger Crozier. Ted wrote a lengthy biography of Roger Crozier in 1995 released by Muskoka Publications.

Ted Currie, a proud Muskokan, has numerous other blog sites you can access online.

Why embark on a ghost hunt - a mystery quest? There aren't any fairies, gnomes, trolls or UFO's....are there?

Ghouls, hobgoblins, zombies, vampires?

By Ted Currie

Muskoka History Resources

I was looking through a pile of old books I collect, picking up a half dozen that had fallen over on the old hearth here at Birch Hollow, our Gravenhurst, Ontario homestead, when low and behold a business card appeared at my feet. Now Canadian author/researcher John Robert Colombo might find this hard to believe but none the less, there it was right under my nose.....a modest stretch of the arm to pick up his business card from the odd little space on the bricks amidst the artful array of fallen titles

strewn on and off the cold hearth. As if placed there as an exclamation point amongst the printed words of some really excellent books, was the business card of Colombo & Company, John Robert Colombo, one of Canada's best known "master gatherers," an unyielding, intrepid researcher who has done so much to reveal the mysteries, legends and tales of the unexplained in this country. He has published many books with stories of haunted places, about haunted lives, and published hundreds of first person accounts of experiences with the paranormal, provided by citizens who trust his sensitivity to these often emotional tales or ghostly encounters.

Quite a few years ago now, I was one of the contributors to John's efforts to record these first person accounts, with a re-telling of a paranormal experience I had while living in a Manitoba Street residence, in Bracebridge, back in the late 1970's. The story was published a few years later in a book he had released documenting a new and higly interesting collection of regional Canadian hauntings. We kept up a correspondence for a number of years, and it was with great honor that I was able to recruit him to compose the opening column of a lengthy series of Muskoka ghost stories I was writing for a local publication known as The Muskoka Sun, back in the mid 1990's. Following that success he suggested that I should write my own book documenting local ghost stories for the district market. A note on the back of the business card he sent me about the same time, read "Ted: I hope one day you write 'Ghosts of Muskoka.'

So here it was, John's business card that had been neatly pressed into one of his books, with this note on the back,.... and here I was reading and scanning through three books on ghosts and the paranormal; well, you can gather it was a sign I couldn't, and wouldn't ignore one moment longer. It was time, after more than a decade of pondering the possibilities that I finally put down in print, for the global audience, just what paranormal gad-abouts, appearances and maleovolant behaviour occurs here in the Ontario hinterland beyond fern and bogland, hill and misty dale. It was the good Mr. Colombo who....at about the point when I seriously contemplated giving up writing altogether, suggested my writing reminded him of his friend and Canadian author Wayland Drew....who penned the well known Canadian classic "Superior - The Haunted Shore," amongst many others. John at the time, didn't know that I had worked with Wayland to launch the local historical society and musuem. I had worked closely with Wayland for a number of years and had greatly admired his work. I was the one who informed him that Wayland had passed away after a lengthy illness. It felt a little surreal but it was all part and parcel of many coincidences and strange spiritual connections that have happened since, continuing to remind me an important life-enhancing task was yet to complete. Not a mundane chore of text building but rather one that would be adventure-filled and exciting even sitting at this scuffed-up old keyboard......in the hollow of my office between towers of old books and mounds of half-fallen paper files currently defying gravity. It's pretty much the problem of being both an historian and bibliophile that I face suffocation by printed word, every day here, in this precarious abstract of a life's work. But what inspirational environs in which to work.....being surrounded by the work of some of the finest authors ever published. I count John Robert Colombo among that group.

I have great respect for the work of John Robert Colombo, and we are richer in this country because of his exceptional and ongoing contribution to the archives documenting our social, - and paranormal legacy from the first days questing for survival on this continent to the present. I would like to dedicate this hale and hardy adventure to profile Muskoka and Algonquin Park ghosts, to Mr. Colombo, that although a wee decade or so behind its time, has finally made it to online publication. Thank you John for the encouragment to develop an inventory of regional haunts, those who have been haunted and many other paranormal encounters never before documented. First of all I would like to document my own encounters. Hope you enjoy the following editorial offerings.

In the spirit of Washington Irving and tales of the Haunted Hudson

In the mid 1990's I became fascinated with the under-recognized, and largely ignored historical reality my hometown, the Town of Bracebridge, Ontario, was named after the title of a book written by legendary Amercian author, Washington Irving. The book was known as "Bracebridge Hall," published I believe in the early 1820's, a carry over of stories from the earlier Sketch Book which first introduced Squire Bracebridge and life at the English countryside's "Bracebridge Hall," a fictional manor house that was most likely inspired by a stay Irving had at Sir Walter Scott's home, known as "Abbotsford." There has long been debate about the estate Irving had in mind when writing Bracebridge Hall, but most similarities seem to rest with Scott's abode. Irving was fascinated by Scott's Border Tales, and the adventurous hikes the two had taken through the storied property in the so called "old country."

In 1864 a curious, well read and history-minded postal authority in Canada, by the name of W.D. LeSueur (who became both a well published literary critic and Canadian historian), had the task of approving and in some cases naming pioneer hamlets registering for official postal outlets. Two years earlier he named the hamlet of Gravenhurst after a book written by revered British poet-author William Henry Smith, entitled "Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil," which wasn't as dire as the title suggests. When he completed his literary attachments for the two Muskoka towns, he neglected to provide each with the accompanying provenance which would have explained his reasons for borrowing names from a poet and author from other parts of the world. As a result, even up the the mid 1990's, well more than a century later, very few knew of the connections to Smith and Irving, and nothing much was known about W.D. LeSueur. It is not the purpose of this blog-site on old haunts here in Muskoka, to spend too much time discussing the handiwork of Dr. LeSueur. You can read about that in my Muskoka and Gravenhurst blog sites. Rather my fascination was peaked with the "spirited" work of Irving, in particular, because during research for a later publication, about the link between town and author, I had re-read both The Sketch Book and Bracebridge Hall.....quite inspired by the fact Washington Irving had an unyielding respect for preservation of cultural attachments....legend and lore, tradition and the preservation of stories about ghosts, ghosts ships, apparitions good and bad; and stories that told of spirited rides like that of the infamous headless horseman and the strange goings on in Sleepy Hollow. It was Irving more than any other writer, who drew attention to the mysteries of the Hudson River valley and the phantom ships and crews that navigated the mist-laden, hill embraced, narrow snaking waterway through forest and haunted valley.

I had for years found many regional parallels here in Muskoka to the physical characteristics of the longer, more storied Hudson, with the attributes of thick forests, rolling hillsides, deeply gouged lowlands, and meandering waterways. The black ribbon through the morning mist, and thunderous cataracts of the Muskoka River, where voices of the dead were said to call out to the living. There were some perceived similarities, particularly to the young reader, consuming the story of Ichabod Crane's Sleepy Hollow, and on many, many nights, I swear that I heard the pounding of hooves from the phantom beast carrying the headless horseman, down the well trodden paths through the woodland we knew only as The Grove, and along by the old swimming hole we called Bass Rock. A few of us more imaginative lads well expected to be swept up into the horseman's arms, to feel on our cheeks the flames from the jack-o-lantern he held under his arm, while the other hand held the reins of the fiersome beast galloping into the moonlight. This was our own Historic Hudson. The Muskoka River valley. And we were all young Irvings, penning wide and varied endings to the chapter best suited our needs. We scared ourselves half to death on those darker than dark autumn nights, when the boney fingers of early winter touched the passive soul.

I knew Muskoka was haunted even as a kid. It wasn't all imagination. We had all seen things, heard stuff, and witnessed what can only be called now, endearing enchantments of youth.....never to be fully explained but always taken into account when thinking back to the events and circumstances of a childhood well invested in a good hometown. It is quite beyond our control to change what has been imprinted by the adventures of once. It was the story below the headline, the meat on the proverbial bone. I hadn't lived in this ballywick for all those years without having gathered the evidence it was both a unique hometown and a fertile plot for those who cared to delve beyond commonplace..... believing with heart and soul in the dynamic of the supernatural. I never really understood the work of author C.S. Lewis, who wrote about the scope and unknown possibilities of the supernatural as one encounters it from one end of life to the other. I don't suppose I would have been a very good student under the tutorship of the good Mr. Lewis but I have always kept it in mind that to define supernatural requires more breadth of understanding before it is appropriately attached to an event or encounter. It takes a tad more investigation and interpretation than I was afforded then as an inquisitive, largely untutored citizen. I just bandied about "supernatural" as a blanket description for anything that was out of the ordinary.....from the bump in the night to the invisible footfall up the staircase. But I wanted to learn more, and I suppose over a lifetime my greatest character enhancement has been to question the reality of everything, and the relevances of everything in between. I'm so confident that the refrigerator light goes off when I shut the door that I have given up entirely the mission to sit inside to verify this fact. So this being said, can I be sure there are ghosts and a headless horseman when I have so little proof.....other than the vivid imagination I inherited from a long line of inquisitive ancestors? Well first of all, there's fiction and non-fiction. The headless horseman is a work of great fiction. My childhood pre-occupation, like many youngsters having some difficulty differentiating between reality and fantasy, painted a good deal of life into the phantom horseman. This was in part due to Mr. Irving being an exceptional story spinner....and the reader being so pitifully absorbed by the myriad mysteries hatched in that historic Hudson Valley

The stories of ghostly, spirited, paranormal and supernatural encounters I've had in Muskoka, and have researched over the past thirty odd years, are not frightful or disturbing accounts. While at the time they were a little unsettling, none of my own experiences made me feel uneasy or unwilling to seek them out a second or third time for posterity. I have never once felt in the presence of evil or malevolence although I have had a recurring dream for about a decade that suggests I should be scared of one particular entity.....which was inspired by a rather odd feeling I had about an attic in one of the houses I was associated in the late 1970's, early 1980's. I can't say it was akin to anything evil, just that the dream always ends prior to me finding out just what the opposing entity is, and what it wants with this old author anyway. I'll detail this further into the blog site and you can decide for yourself whether I'm in trouble upcoming, or was it simply the twisted root of indigestion......you know, the salty popcorn too close to bedtime that generates a wee nightmare from time to time.

While I have a beginning of this series planned, I have no conclusion intended and hope to keep adding to this inventory as time goes by, publishing new haunts on top of the old, to properly represent the spirit-kind and other related anomolies of my home region, the District of Muskoka.....of which I include the region of Algonquin Park and the mystery of Tom Thomson; also part of this collection of tales, legends, yarns and old wives' tales, when and where they become available. If you have any Muskoka ghost stories etc. yourself, please email me a summary of the story, and if you desire, we can include some of the details in this blog site. Thanks for reading and participating in this newest Muskoka blog site. Let's keep in touch. More stories on the way. While there was a time when I was worried about ridicule for believing in ghosts, goblins and the assorted wee beasties that haunt hill and moor, aye, after all my years being ridiculed for just about everything else, it is a pleasure to unfetter from the impositions of accepted thought and conservative protocol, to march on with this drum beat of adventure.....to meet face to face the unkown.....some I will undoubtedly like, some others may generate a little fear and trembling...... but truth be known, I'm too old and carefree now to worry about monsters under the bed. I only check once and a while now! I want to learn all there is to know about the activities of the paranormal.....what learned folks refer to with considerable expertise.....the supernatural!

-30-

The enchantments of childhood live on, in memory as Peter Pan's Neverland

My parents never told me that Peter Pan was a fraud and it wasn't until the end of public school that I sort of knew what "fictional" meant; and that's when Peter's "Neverland" and places like "Oz" fell apart for me.....I was an uncomplicated but always daydreaming kid, who stared out the classroom window desiring far off places, great escapes from my fetters, and lasting, fulfilling adventure. Like I said, my parents gave me all the freedom a kid could ask for, particularly when it came to the dynamic of an over-active imagination.

I used to sit on the platform of the Bracebridge Train Station, for hours on end, positioned up on one of the baggage carts, waiting for my special "escape" train to come in....so I could jump a freight car and head out over the wild and amazing countryside.....the opportunities were endless. Yet hundreds of trains passed me by in those ever-dreaming vigils but yet in my yearning young heart I was an experienced, story revelling traveller......mostly in spirit and the imagination of a writer apprentice. As a kid I was keen for just about any adventure. I just couldn't justify the risk of breaking my mother's heart by disappearing in a boxcar to some exotic locale. I did, over the years, without any other intervening excitement, become an astute "watcher" of events and curious other "goings on" down by the infamous Albion Hotel (across from the train station), where bouncers hastily exited their unwanted patrons without first opening the doors. It was really my first foray into the work of an historian.....experiencing actuality. In fact, I experienced so much actuality back then, I can't keep a straight face now, hearing or reading some other tight-arse historian trying to "make nice" and commonplace, the lives and shananigans of the colorful characters who occupied our community. I saw things differently. I paid attention to the real-life exhibitions occurring and didn't have to rely on the polished, sanitized overviews published in the local press, to paint my road forward with conservative protocol.

I was given ample freedom to explore life and times as a young lad, and I found many neat portals to watch down on this world of "the hometown." And mixed in were the kind of spirited, unexplained, allegedly supernatural stuff nobody, even this well-read voyeur, could really explain. I was just delighted to be able to observe. I didn't need the encumberance of research to find answers, just the moment or two in the midst of the paranormal to drink it all in.....like the box car I didn't jump aboard out of fear I'd fall short....I wasn't going to miss any opportunity to experience the so called super-natural when within observational reach.

I don't think my home region was any more spirited than any other community but not every ballywick had a watcher like me in the midst. When I first began writing about paranormal experiences in Muskoka, particularly Bracebridge, back in the early 1980's, a few of the self-acclaimed leaders of civility and good humor, felt I was out of order and should cease and desist congering up any more ghosts and goblins. While I love my old home town, there are a few objectionable, nasty old trolls under the bridge that I've sparred with for decades, about the rights and privileges of the press and sundry other writers who color outside the lines on purpose. Just to rock the steady-as-she-goes attitude that has prevailed for decades, I admit to being provocative to a fault. That would be me. The boat-rocker! The mad painter who believes soulfully that lines are suggestions and not the rule. I've seen ghosts. I've felt their spooky vapor. I've had a chat with several, and a Sunday evening dinner or two with others. They were all very sociable encounters. It's just not the kind of stuff you write about, worry my critics, to which I answer.....well, nothing actually. These paranormal encounters are history now so get over it!

My mother Merle never denied the existence of ghosts, hobgoblins, elves or Knights That Say "Neat." She didn't tell me there was "no such thing" as a monster, or multiples of monster-kind in the wide world, depending whether you were on land or sea..... just not under my bed at the time she needed me to nod off. "Of course there aren't any monsters under there......?" she'd bark at my stubborn refusals to settle at night. "Well if not there.....where? She always left that open for interpretation as mothers love to folly with their marginally attentive youngsters. If I told my mother that I had been abducted by aliens all she would have asked is, "Did you change you underwear and socks this morning." Whether she believed in the paranormal or UFOs didn't matter as much as the fact she didn't try to discourage my own investigation. If I thought I had seen a ghost, who was she to de-rail the critical process of learning by deduction.......finding for oneself the clear differences between reality, actuality and wishful, creative thinking. On several occasions I probably did manufacturer contact with the alleged other side, when in fact the vision and the sound the vision made was quite explanable. Merle just nodded and her neutral position left me with the opinion that being open-minded to new things wasn't daft at all in this extraordinary and ever changing universe.

Now back in the real old days. Burlington, Ontario. Late 1950's, early 60's, when it was a town looking to become a city. As a kid getting daily if not hourly soakers playing along the shore of what I called Ramble Creek, the dense bush in the small hollow that bordered Harris Crescent and Torrance, and Lakeshore Road running along Lake Ontario, gave me a fertile environs to let my imagination root. While a kid's free climb of anticipation and expectation is supposed to be untethered until taught restraint at a later age, being an only child without a huge whack of friends, I occupied my time studying everything around me, and making friends with any critter that crossed my path. I would sit on the bank of the babbling creek and compose poems long before I knew what it meant to be "poetic". I fell in love with a little school chum named Angela, who used to invite me across a narrows in the creek, to play on the rusty swing that cut through the sunlight with a noisy, rusted cadence of chain on tin, a pendulum in silhouette that caught my attention, my heart with both hands. When I visited Angela it was as if her sunny side of the river was bonified wonderment rationalized, partly because I was smitten and secondly because I had no idea what the symptoms of newfound love could do to a budding imagination. Where was I? The Twilight Zone? But Angela's soft pink hand, so warm and comforting seemed as real as the pounding heart trying to jump from my chest. But after all the pondering and recalling since, I really don't know whether she was mortal or a manifestation of make believe.....if what I witnessed was even a smidgeon "real", I thusly have proof of angelic existence on earth. She was glorious. I still sort through the contradictions of experiences and truths about young Angela, who has haunted me in memory ever since.

For many years, I confess, I had my doubts about whether Angela was anything more than an elaborate illusion of a silly boy, being a waif that didn't really exist in the hand to hand sense; a visitation with a message, maybe? I know I was on my way toward Lake Ontario to sail a small model boat I had crafted, when she intervened on that first encounter. My mother always told me I'd surely drown if I disobeyed her and hiked to the lakeshore. Maybe she was supposed to intercept me and "spare me over for another year"....the words of an old song about buying a little more time from God. I could never find Angela when looking through old school photographs, and yet that's where I strongly believed we had met. At least I thought this was the case but unless she was absent for the class photo, there may have been more ghost than fibre to that friend of mine. It's not easy however, admitting that such an important person in my life may have been a mirage of wishful thinking. I can still bring that scene back to virtual reality any time I wish, and feel the warm sun on my body, swinging there while facing the amber sparkle of the creek water washing over thin limestone. Had I been swinging the afternoons away with "Angela the Angel? Possibly. But it was just one of many similar incidents over a full and mystery filled childhood that always seemed a tad more enchanted than it was supposed to be......at least according to those who tried to teach me by example. Admittedly I made a crappy student and a worse-off follower. The humourless beggars? The killjoys! Like I said, my parents didn't poo-poo ideas or observations I made, unless they were dangerous falsehoods that could have gotten me killed. We had massive hydro towers nearby and on more than one occasion I had been successful in getting to the second level of iron work. I did reckon that without wings the fall from grace was going to hurt like hell. So on several life and safety issues I did listen to the voices of authority. Angela kept me away from that lake. Not once but on numerous occasions, when that deep blue horizon drove me crazy with excitement....just as it did when I saw a train coming to the Bracebridge station with an open boxcar......just a short run and a nimble leap away from the open rails and wide open spaces.

As I wrote about earlier in this collection of blogs, the Ramble (or as some folks called it "Rambo") Creek basin, was an enchanted woodlands if ever there was one. It was thick and vine-clad and had a history intertwined on and through its remaining half fallen garden architecture, the fascinating trelaces and benches of a once grand Victorian estate, eeriely shadowed and overgrown, much as I could imagine the legendary enclosure of Alice's own Wonderland.

Through my early days and pretty much up to the present, I exercise a critical approach to most things, allowing myself the privilege of witholding judgement on subjects of debate until I can pro and con it into discernable qualities and quanties of half or near truths. I'm a bloody nuisance this way but I'm simply not going to deny or dismiss something without the substance of sensible argument, and even then I'm open to new input or old research to right any misconception. While I believe in ghosts, I also believe there is a scientific explanation. I believe in the existence of alien life forms but I don't set myself out in a field every night awaiting my turn to be abducted. If someone told me, as a reporter (which was my profession for many years) that there was a crop circle I should inspect, I would have hit the ground in a full Canadian trot (a little more conservative speed than most trots). Yet I wouldn't say, on inspection, that it was a manifestation of bored aliens....or that it had been done by out of this world anything, until I could prove it hadn't been the handiwork of a prankster(s). As a reporter I had stared down many such weird and whacky tales and even been duped on a few occasions when I didn't follow my instincts that a new "dupe" was about to be gleefully regaled. Poor Me!

Whether it was my family's liberal, never say never attitude or not, I have grown up with the idea that anything is possible, whether it be Queen Mab and the moonlight revel of the fairies, the curious travels of gnomes, trolls, hob-goblins, ghosts and other sundry wee beasties that traverse the misty moors late at night. So with this series of blogs you won't find blind acceptance to anything. It takes a steep, unreserved commitment to put a name to a lengthy tome like this that pretty much declares "I've seen dead people and stuff"....., which for all intents and purposes, does seem to favor the existence, in this writer's opinion, of the paranormal over what naysayers would like to quash as unscientific, unproven and sloppy old hogwash. I must thusly confess without regret, that I am not neutral in this matter. The stories in this collection, as I have duly noted previously, all have to do with first person encounters with what meets the criteria and definition of the paranormal and the "yet to be fully explained."

My wife Suzanne and I are long time historians in this region of Ontario, Canada. We deal with fact as historians and have worked on major research projects that demand attention to detail. Hearsay and speculation don't cut it for historians unless its an opinion piece. Some times it is, but most often the group or client we're working for wants factual record of an event or company history not the meanderings and inaccuracies that can be associated with prognostications and frothy adjective-burdened expectations. When however, we are working on a detail of history, such as the alleged accidental death of Canadian artist, Tom Thomson, where speculation has its place, then we balance carefully what we know with what we can imagine....based on the roughed-in, re-created scene and circumstances, to better understand how various events could have altered the outcome. We've paddled Algonquin's Canoe Lake many times in the past 12 years trying to re-create that 1917 murder scene. Not done yet!

Exactly as a judicial enquiry would beat the facts and speculation into something to hold up to the light.....we hope to find the flaws in the theory. Dealing with the flaws makes it a much tighter theory. We spend more time, I think, debunking our own theories in an attempt to make a sensible approach to the subject issue. We like to think of our work as having forensic intent but we are afterall just historical folks without rank.... not ghost-busters or ghost chasers with blinking scientific devices strapped to our backs, sniffing the atmosphere for ghostly remainders; and we stand by our overviews with our file-folders spilling forth with research material. Not as fascinating as catching "Slimer" in a ghost sucking machine but we're content with out finds anyway. When we tackle something like supernatural encounters, we do so with great and unyielding attention to detail, and offer as much counterpoint such that some readers might even believe we are, in reality, calling ourselves "nutters"..... for actually believing our own stories of ghostly encounters. Yet there's no way, even after many, many encounters with the so-called other side, or spirit world, that we can claim to have had anything more than an unusual visitation and accompanying experience by something that may or may not have been of the paranormal variety. We'll tell you what happened, and what we believe occurred in full detail but by golly, the believing part is up to you because frankly, we're still chasing down proof even years after something strange has crossed into our neighborhood. It's the history thing that keeps us questing for more information before we can say without a doubt, what we held hands with was a true, cold and misty entity of another dimension.

Any one who says to me "I don't believe in ghosts," is an individual I don't try to influence one way or the other. I won't say I agree with them but I certainly won't waste the time and energy to sway them to be paranomal flag wavers. It isn't that important afterall. When my wife and I have had encounters, they have never been ones that we sought out. We didn't purposely stay over in haunted houses or hold moonlit vigils in creepy old graveyards, employing night vision goggles, looking for whisps of mist that look like wandering spirits escaping the grave. All our events have been unexpected and at times when ghosts were the furthest from our respective focus. This is what has always amazed us,.... that we have never been able to meet up with the spirit-kind on purpose, on our terms but rather when they felt it was time to appear. You will see numerous examples of this in this collection of ghost-related tales.