forty years, I have been an assiduous collector of “Canadian mysteries.” Perhaps I should explain this term because there are not too many collectors of mysteries, Canadian or otherwise, in this or any other country. What I mean by “Canadian mysteries” is accounts of events or experiences that are neither explicable nor inexplicable, but at present are unexplained. Hence I have in mind the operations of powers or abilities that are above and beyond the capacity of human beings to entertain or perform, as well as of events that seemingly defy rational explanation. Such occurrences have been reported in the past, continue to be reported by Canadians in the present, and, I have no doubt, will continue to be reported in the future.
I collect such accounts but I specialize in the ones that are expressed in the words and phrases of the witnesses themselves, rather than in the words and paraphrases of interviewers, reporters, or commentators. First-person statements convey a sense of immediacy that is lacking in second-hand or third-hand accounts. There is a fair amount of interest in these statements and I am pleased to devote time and energy to collecting them — which means I enjoy encountering people — and setting down their memories in readable form.
Many people enjoy reading about the unexplained, the mysterious, and the fantastic, and there are various reasons why this is so. Perhaps the main reason is simply the wonder of it all. Most of us at one time or another has pondered the mysteries of life and death — about such matters as extensions of the mind, body, or spirit in time and space and about access to minds other than our own. Indeed, we have often worried about the state after life as well as the state before life, and here is a place to shelve our apprehensions, at least for the time being. Are powers greater than human fictions? We may soberly ask ourselves, can such things be?
Accounts of psychical and other activities are “wonder tales” and come in one of two kinds — narrative accounts and personal accounts. The narrative accounts are basically objective reports of peculiar events, like acts of prophecy, reports of mysterious disappearances, instances of telepathy, et cetera. The personal accounts, on the other hand, are subjective reports that take the form of first-person descriptions of experiences that have occurred to that person. Both kinds of accounts are “told as true,” — that is, they record events and experiences that defy rational expectation, supposedly true reports that elicit disbelief. Such stories — the word story is something of a misnomer here because it involves fiction, but here it is being used in its non-fictional meaning — characteristically involve encounters with ghosts and spirits. Far from being rare, such stories are quite common! I like to say that extraordinary experiences are extraordinarily common. They are widely reported from coast to coast, even in Canada!
The subject of the paranormal is a vast one and it is surveyed in dozens of books that I have written or compiled, many of them of limited distribution, but most of them commercially available. For instance, I compiled The Big Book of Canadian Ghost Stories, which brought together almost two hundred such accounts. One reviewer compared the book’s jumbo form to that of the telephone directory of a middle-sized city! And it is large, for it contains some 175,000 words — the same number of words as the present volume, The Big Book of Canadian Hauntings, which is the size and format of another city’s telephone directory!
The majority of the accounts in these two volumes consist of reports of the first-person variety — that is, they are told by the witnesses themselves. These are not “told-to” stories, nor are they third-person stories — that is, experiences related to a third party, like a journalist, who records them, adding a few frills and possibly chills in the process. Nor are these accounts imaginative fiction like the ghost stories of M.R. James or Robertson Davies or Stephen King. Instead they are “stranger than fiction,” being “told as true,” with nothing irrelevant included and with nothing relevant excluded.
How truthful are these accounts? The reader will have to decide. Some of the prose from the nineteenth century is certainly overwritten, and the newspapermen who contributed these columns are given to embroidery and drollery in equal proportions. Conversely, some of the prose from the twentieth century is underwritten, in the sense that many of the witnesses, lacking some of the structures available to writers of earlier centuries, simply recount their experiences in the ways in which the incidents and the impressions occurred, perhaps with a nod to familiar formulas from horror programs on television or horror movies on the big screen. There is really no way to prove that any of the incidents recorded in these accounts actually occurred, or occurred in the ways that they are being described, so it is expedient to keep a critical eye open.
I like to say that there are three areas of deception — foolishness, fraud, and fantasy — and that each of these is worth a pause. Many people are foolish and find it difficult to distinguish between what they feel and what they think, between what they sense and what they know. Rigorous thinking is difficult for foolish people, who listen to what other people say all the time and hence are deceived — unlike the fraudster, who knows exactly what he is doing. Fraud is outright deception, generally for commercial gain or social power over other people, and there are certainly many celebrated deceptions in the field of psychical research and parapsychology, ranging from peasant mediums who engaged in outright deception to distinguished statisticians, psychical researchers, and parapsychologists who were uncovered fiddling with the records to make a point or two. Finally there is fantasy, basically wishful thinking, and psychologists have suggested that there is a part of the population that is what they call “fantasy prone” — that is, given to mixing imagination with reality. Foolishness and fantasy have characteristics in common, but the main difference between the foolish person and the fantasy-prone person is that the former has no idea what she is doing or saying, whereas the latter knows quite well that her ideas and deeds are not quite right. Foolishness, fraud, and fantasy are areas of deception. But over and above these pitfalls there are areas of knowledge — fields of experience or realms of insight, intuition, and imagination — that exist on their own and that are part of the life of man and woman. These are our mysteries and they inspire our sense of wonder.
The title of the present volume is The Big Book of Canadian Hauntings, but I am of the opinion that its title could be reduced from six words to one word. That one word is fear. This is a book that is all about fear — fear of the unknown, fear of what is outside ourselves, fear of what is inside ourselves, fear of what is above us, what is below us, what is far beyond life itself ... fear of what is beyond death. Indeed, we feel those very fears (the limbs quivering, the skin crawling, the hair standing on end, the body shivering, the pulse quickening, the attention wavering, the perspiration forming, the cheeks flushing, the eyes watering, the stomach trembling, the bowels loosening) in the face of the unknown! We feel ourselves to be threatened, and often the appearance of a ghost or a spirit will initially amplify and then eventually allay that fear. We may then feel a sense of relief, a feeling of completion, or a realization that “we have come full circle.” This is currently called “a sense of closure.” So the present volume is a collection of human stories about fear, about inhuman threats to human beings which may, paradoxically, leave us feeling more human than ever.
As Marshall McLuhan once observed, “The most human thing about man is his technology.” Instead of the word technology, he might have substituted the word ghosts. “The most human thing about man is his ghosts.” Only human beings know anything at all about ghosts and spirits, though it is true that in folklore and literature there are many descriptions of animals responding to appearances and disappearances of spiritual entities. (But this folklore and these works of fiction were written by human beings.) There are many people who are critical of ghost stories and accounts of the unknown, and these people may be sceptics (who doubt rather than believe in the existence or operation of mysterious powers or abilities) or they may be believers (who want to limit such powers or abilities to their own conception of a Holy Spirit, a Holy Ghost, a Saviour, a Devil, a Satan, an angel, et cetera). The truth is nobody knows anything at all for sure about such matters, though sacred scriptures and scientific works of psychology and books of imaginative literature help us along the way. They at least raise great questions. So it is best to maintain an open mind and to accept whatever evidence is at
