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 hand.
This book deals with our principal primordial fear, and that is the fear of the dark. This is the sense of fear and the sense of foreboding that we face when we are lost in the dark, beginning when the sun begins to set at dusk, continuing through the darkness of midnight and the wee hours of the morning (sometimes called the “hours of the wolf”) until the sun begins to rise at dawn, when once again we know what is happening to us. Here night is a metaphor for the “inner night” that alternates with the “inner day” that dawns upon all of us. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Spanish painter Francisco Goya titled one of his demonic etchings. The critical faculties do fall asleep and the associative and imaginative faculties sometimes wake up and “come into their own,” most directly in dreams and the dreams we call nightmares because they are so shocking or so discomforting. The present book is a collection of accounts of how we face the world of darkness and its shadows, how we confront our own fears and experiences (what is “in there”) with what we find in the world (what is “out there”). Many of the experiences reported in the pages of this book will remind its readers of half-formed dreams and half-recalled episodes of real life. Who is to say, along with the ancients, that dreams do not convey knowledge and information? The great psychologists of the twentieth century, notably Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, held strong views on man’s half-remembered, semi-dream life. Freud felt the world of dreams to be “the royal road to the unconscious.” Jung conducted dream analyses in which dreams were treated like mandalas, images to be pondered.
Here is a book of impressions and experiences — the physiological responses of the body, the emotions of the heart, and the thoughts of the mind. They beg the question: what is it that sends us into a state of apprehension, even of shock? It may be many things, but since childhood we are conditioned to worry about imaginary beings. Many children begin to play with their own imaginary companions. Other children fear the “monster under the bed.” Indeed, youngsters are introduced to imaginary beings — good fairies, bad fairies, Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, et cetera — which then take the form of inscrutable figures, some of them companions or guardians, others of them scarecrow-like figures, stern and even destructive. Witness these horrible synonyms for ghosts and spirits, which I corralled from a thesaurus:
aliens, apparitions, banshees, beasts, beings, bogeymen, brownies, chimeras, demons, devils, doppelgangers, doubles, elves, entities, fairies, forerunners, ghosts ghouls, goblins, gremlins, haunts, imps, incubi, kelpies, leprechauns, manes, monsters, phantasms, phantoms, pixies, poltergeists, revenants, shades, shadows, souls, spectres, spirits, spooks, sprites, succubi, sylphs, trolls, vampires, visions, visitants, visitors, wraiths, zombies
There are many more of these where these were found, but I think forty-six synonyms are enough for now!
While checking the thesaurus, I came up with an even greater number of synonyms for fear and dread. Here are sensations, affections, and notions that overcome people from time to time in real-life situations and are recalled when they read accounts like the ones in this book:
agitation, alarm, amazing, anguish, anxiety, apprehension, astonishing, astounding, awesome, baffling, bewildering, bizarre, concern, confounding, confusing, cryptic, curious, disquieting, distress, dread, dumbfounding, elusive, enigmatic, extraordinary, fabulous, fanciful, fantastic, fear, foreboding, fright, ghastly, grotesque, hallucinatory, horror, illusory, imaginary, incomprehensible, incredible, inexplicable, marvelous, mysterious, mystifying, outlandish, panic, paradoxical, perplexing, puzzling, quaking, quivering, scare, shakes, shivers, shocked, shudder, startled, strain, strange, stress, suspense, sweats, tension, terrifying, terror, tremble, trepidation, troubled, unfathomable, unusual, upset, weird, wondrous, worry
That list consists of seventy-two descriptors, but I am sure there are many more such words.
Here in these pages there