The Big Book of Canadian Hauntings. John Robert Colombo

      Did you ever wonder whether the place where you are now dwelling is haunted?

      Here is a big book about such matters, about ghosts and hauntings, a book that is calculated to make you pause and wonder about the world of spirits, about haunted sites and places, and about the interconnections that may exist between the world of the living and the world of the dead or unborn. The accounts in this tome raise questions about the extent and limit of human knowledge and the reliability of human experience. In many ways it is an entertaining book; in other ways, a sobering collection of riveting accounts of “what should not be.” In other words, here are one hundred or so of what I call “Canadian mysteries.”

      For the last 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