Jeepers Creepers: Canadian Accounts of Weird Events and Experiences

By John Robert Colombo

Here are over 40 scary, hair-raising, and frightening stories of the supernatural and the paranormal. These are first-person narratives that are unexplained and possibly inexplicable. All of them have been reported to John Robert Colombo, Canada’s Master Gatherer of the Arcane, by men and women from various parts of the country, and they’re published here in the words of the informants themselves, the witnesses to these wonders.

Here, you will have the opportunity to read about:

• A woman from Ottawa who is visited nightly by her dead husband.
• A man from Quebec who is haunted by visions of the past.
• The couple from Regina, Saskatchewan, who commune with spirits through a Ouija board.
• The woman from Newcastle, Ontario, who finds the house of her dreams with a terrible secret.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Aug 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781554889839

John Robert Colombo

John Robert Colombo, the author of the best-selling Colombo's Canadian Quotations and Fascinating Canada, has written, translated, or edited over two hundred books. He is the recipient of the Harbourfront Literary Prize and the Order of Canada, and is a Fellow of the Frye Centre.

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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 don’t 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 wife’s 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 1845–46 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 Kathleen’s 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 didn’t 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 couldn’t 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 Howard’s parents. (Maurice and Patrick were two of his brothers.) This would have been Joe’s 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?

I’m 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.

My Other Ghostly Experience

Ann Atherstone

The author of the following email is a woman I have never met but would one day like to. A few years ago, she sent me a finely written account of her eerie experience. I accepted it for publication in my next collection and wrote to her to this effect. It duly appeared in The Big Book of Canadian Ghost Stories. Although it appeared, somehow her mailing and emailing addresses both disappeared. (That sounds like an unlikely mystery story: The Case of the Disappearing Addresses!) Luckily for both of us, Ms. Genders kept in touch and sent me a query about the fate of her account. I was relieved that I was able to send her a copy of the book. In my letter promising her a copy of the collection, I asked if the experience she had described was an isolated one. Anticipating the delivery of the long-delayed copy, she sent me the following list of odd occurrences that had come her way over the years.

I will now let Ms. Genders continue in her own lively way.

Thank you for your kind letter, John. I will look forward to the book. Yes, I have had other incidents, having noticed strange things all of my life, but most of them have been more of a mystical nature, and not ghostly.

Though as college students living on Sandford Avenue, my roommate and I sincerely believed the house we lived in was being attended to by the deceased husband of the lady from whom we were renting our flat. A widow of long-standing, she was nevertheless very happy and felt he was around somehow. We noticed that whenever we wanted to go out and party, our keys or change purses would disappear. This occurred so frequently that we had to plan how to get back into the house after curfew without our keys, which we would find in very odd places the next day (e.g., in a flour