The Big Book of Canadian Hauntings. John Robert Colombo

with their passage from the earth to my tower top. If, like an electric current, they used the lightning rod as a means of transit, I made a plan which would compel them to use it in the conventional and proper way. The rod was placed that the lightning might come down it, not that it might go up, so I set myself to put the rod in a condition that it would permit the ghosts to descend as the lightning did, but which would prevent them from going up.

      Accordingly I thoroughly greased the rod for a considerable distance above the ground.

      “No,” said I to myself, “you may all come down, one after the other whenever you like. You will descend very quickly when you reach the greased part of the rod, but you will not go up it again. You are getting very bold, and if you continue your mad revels in my tower you will frighten people and give my house a bad name. You may become dryads if you like and shut yourself up in the hearts of the tall and solemn oaks. There you may haunt the blue jays and the woodpeckers, but they will not tell tales of ghostly visits, which may keep my friends away and make my servants give me warning.”

      After that there were no more gray flashes up my lighting rod, though how many came down it I know not, and the intramural revels in the tower ceased. But not for long. The ghosts came back again; perhaps not so many as before, but still enough for them to let me know that they were there.

      How they ascended to their lofty haunts I could not tell, nor did I try to find out. I accepted the situation. I could not contend with these undaunted sprites.

      One evening in the autumn, outside the same window from which I had seen the first ghost of the tower, I saw another apparition, but it was not one of the gray specters to which I had become accustomed. It was a jet black demon. Its eyes large, green and glaring, shone upon me, and it was as motionless and hard as a statue cut in coal.

      For only an instant I saw it, and then in a flash, like the apparition I had first seen from that window, it disappeared. After that I saw the demon again and again and strange to say the ghosts in my tower became fewer and fewer, and at last disappeared altogether. The advent of the black spirit seemed to have exerted an evil influence over the spirits in gray, and like the Indian in the presence of the white man, they faded away and gradually became extinct.

      The last time I saw one of my ghosts it appeared to me late on the November afternoon among the brown foliage of an aged oak, just as a dryad might have peeped forth from her leafy retreat wondering if the world were yet open to her for a ramble under the stars. The world was open to my gray ghost, but only in one direction.

      Between it and me could be seen among the shadows of the ground the dark form of the demon, trembling and waiting. Then away from the old oak, away from my house and tower, along the limbs of the trees which stood on the edge of the wood, slowly and silently, my ghost vanished from my view like a little gray cloud, gently moving over the sky, at last dissolving out of my sight.

      Now, in the early hours of the night my tower is quiet and still. There are no more knocks, no more revels in the hidden passages in the walls. My ghosts are gone. All that I hear now are the voices in the chimney, but I know that these are only imaginary voices, and, therefore they produce in me no feeling of companionship. But my ghosts really existed.

4 STRANGE EVENTS AND STRANGER PEOPLE

      In this section will be found phenomena that are not readily explained. The blind seemingly see, the deaf apparently hear. Events that occur in distant parts of the world might be accessible to people living far, far away. Even the future may be “seen” or foretold. Prophecies are fulfilled! All through the ages there have been reports of such powers, and these reports, when not anecdotal, are quite often well-attested by reputable people, professionally trained observers, et cetera. Yet such powers, if and when they are manifested, exert themselves sporadically at best. It seems that they cannot be recreated in laboratories. Carl Sagan, the astronomer and advocate of the scientific method, nourished a sense of awe and wonder about man and the natural world, especially the cosmos. He was attracted to mysteries, yet all the while he kept foremost in his mind Marcello Truzzi’s maxim: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

THE OLD WOMAN’S ACCOUNT

      A Native woman predicts the outcome of a battle fought elsewhere between her people and the English forces based on a vision. This instance of successful “jugglery” (the term used by Europeans to describe the work of medicine men or shamans) among the Mississauga Indians of that region was reported by Pierre Pouchot, a French officer at Fort Niagara in 1756. His account appears in Memoir upon the Late War in North America, Between the French and English, 1755–60 (Roxbury, Massachusetts. Printed for W. Elliott Woodward, 1866), a two-volume work translated from French and edited by Franklin B. Hough. (For knowledge of this reference I am grateful to Donald Smith of the Department of History of the University of Calgary.) Pouchot’s circumstantial account, although sketchy in the extreme, is interesting in at least one way. It states that an unnamed officer took notes and “confirmed” the Native woman’s account. In other words, the account is not simply hearsay or rumour but fact, and although brief, represents centuries of “jugglery.”

      At the end of six or seven days, they [the French officers at Fort Niagara] enquired why they [the Mississauga Indian women] made no more medicine, when an old woman replied that their people had beaten [won]; that she had juggled and that they had killed many people. An officer who knew these juggleries, wrote down the spot, the day that she designated, and when the party returned, he questioned the Indians and prisoners whose answers confirmed the old woman’s account.

A REPUTED CANADIAN WITCH

      “A Reputed Canadian Witch” appeared in The Bathurst Courier (Bathurst, New Brunswick), April 7, 1854. The account is apparently reprinted from the Bytown Gazette (Bytown, now Ottawa, Ontario).

      We find the following singular statement in the Bytown Gazette: —