In the spirit of All Hallows Eve, join me at this virtual campfire and let’s journey into the supernatural realm with these shared haunting experiences, where the past reaches out to touch the present and the boundaries blur between here and the hereafter.
Big Bang Theory
“My family has lived on Manitoulin Island for generations, and that will always be home to me, but this story is about an experience my partner and I once had after relocating to a different part of the province for work.
Fortunately, or so we thought, we got what seemed like a good deal on a rental home. A co-worker gave me his uncle’s number and suggested he might have something “reasonable” if we were interested.
After viewing the property, we decided the house would do just fine. The only flaw I could see was with the front door. It still operated OK, but it looked like a violent forced entry had occurred in the past and severely damaged it. It was patched up and repainted, but the look of it was unsettling.
“What happened there?” I asked the owner.
The question seemed to fluster him a bit, and he quickly changed the subject without answering me. I should have trusted my gut instinct about his reaction and kept looking at other properties, but I decided it wasn’t a deal breaker, and we signed the rental agreement.
At first, all was well. Within a few weeks, though, a growing list of strange stuff kept occurring. Coins suddenly appeared all over the house in the weirdest spots. Items like car keys and glasses disappeared whenever needed and then reappeared in very random places. The feeling of being watched was constant. Electrical devices went haywire regularly for no apparent reason. Just to name a few examples.
Our dog was often mesmerized by something we could never see, almost in a trance-like way. At other times, though, she would go into complete protection mode, with teeth bared as she growled threateningly at thin air. That was not her disposition at all. Something in that house was turning her into a nervous wreck.
Then, the noises began. Late at night, when everything should have been perfectly still, we would be jolted awake by loud bangs that seemed to shake the house. We would rush downstairs to see what was happening. But nothing could ever be seen. On two consecutive nights, we heard the frightening banging along with the sound of glass shattering, as though something heavy and fragile had been smashed against the hardwood floor near the front door. But nothing was out of place when we ran to see what had happened. It was crazy.
As we got to know our next-door neighbour better, he asked us if we were doing OK in the house. We smiled and nodded, not wanting to tell him how bizarre it was.
“Well, that’s good,” he said. “The last folks couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”
We stared at him speechlessly, then asked for more information about that. He then told us about the woman who had owned the house for many years and about her death there about a decade ago. She needed medical help, but when the fire department and ambulance answered her call, the front door was locked, and they couldn’t get in to help her. By the time they broke through the door, it was too late, and she was dead. And some seem to think she haunts the house now.
That explained the damaged front door and possibly the residual banging noises that haunted that environment. After we moved out, we saw that the owner put the house up for sale instead of renting it out again. We also noticed he finally had a new front door installed. Wonder if that ended those haunting bangs.”
Big Kid
“When I was a little boy, I sometimes saw a “big kid,” as I called him, who seemed to be a part of our household but never spoke to anyone. No one else ever saw him, and my brothers made fun of me for having “an imaginary friend.”
But I did see him walk into the room where the rest of us were gathered, stare straight at me and give me a slight smile. He’d glance at the rest of the family, one by one, and then slowly walk out again. No one else ever noticed him, so I stopped mentioning him to avoid being laughed at and told I must have dreamed it.
As I got older, though, I stopped seeing him too.
It wasn’t until I was an adult and sorting through some old papers and photographs after my father’s death that I happened upon a very old family portrait at the bottom of the box, taken before my father was born. According to the faint pencilled message on the back, the teenage boy was my grandparents’ adopted son and was photographed with their younger children shortly before his death.
I turned the photograph over again and stared at the same “big kid” I had seen many times in my childhood, decades after his death. He had a very distinctive look, and I recognized him immediately. And, if all those encounters in my childhood somehow were just dreams as my parents and brothers had insisted they must have been, that would also be incredible to have had this same young man come to me as I slept.
But I know I was not dreaming. It was real.
He must have still felt a connection to my father’s family, with how he “checked in” on us the way I saw him doing in my younger years. Perhaps he still is, and one of my own little children can see him.
I display that photograph, framed and on our mantel, beside other family members, to honour and keep his memory now. Everyone will know who he is if he ever decides to visit again.”
The Best Chum
“My late dad and his family moved out west when he was very young. But every summer, they came back to visit their family on the Island, especially his great aunt, who had helped to care for him as an infant when his mother was very ill. They always remained very close.
This is a tale I heard my father tell, that I’d like to share with you.
One day, during a summertime visit, his great-aunt asked if he’d like to join her for a walk. She grew beautiful flowers in her front gardens to adorn her loved ones’ gravesites. It gave her pleasure, and my father was happy to pick the flowers she pointed to and arrange them into bouquets for her. When several bouquets had been tied with ribbons, they set off together to the old cemetery not too far down the road from her home.
As they strolled along, my dad noticed a tiny girl in the distance. She was watching them as though waiting for them, and as they approached closer, she hopped up and down with excitement.
His great-aunt told him the names of the family and friends whose gravesites would receive floral tributes that day. He already knew of the first few mentioned but stopped her when she included an unfamiliar name.
“Whose name is that?” he asked.
“She was my best chum when I was a little girl about your age. I still bring her flowers too sometimes,” she explained.
“Is she the girl with the red curly hair?” he asked
“Well, she was, yes. How did you know that?”
“Because I think that’s her, jumping up and down and looking at us from over there,” and he pointed towards an old tombstone in the cemetery as they neared the entrance. He never questioned why his great-aunt’s best chum had remained so small while she had become a full-grown lady. But he said he fully believed at the time that she was just an ordinary little girl, not a spirit.
His great-aunt walked directly to the gravesite he pointed to, not because she saw a little girl there too, but because that was the grave of her best chum, who had sadly died at a very young age many years ago. She gently placed one of the bouquets of flowers on her tombstone and said some words that sounded like a prayer to my dad, so he closed his eyes and bowed his head as she spoke.
When he looked up again, the little girl had simply vanished. She was nowhere to be seen in the cemetery or along the road that day, and he never saw her again. But she definitely had been there, he claimed, and she was literally jumping for joy as she awaited them and their flowers. He swore every word of that story was true. And I always believed him.”
These shared experiences are a good reminder of the incredible mysteries surrounding us. Let’s embrace the magic, welcome the unknown, and always keep our sense of wonder alive. After all, life is full of surprises, and who knows what we might encounter next?
Here’s to a Happy and Mystical Halloween!
*Do you also have an exciting and mystical tale to tell? Whether you’ve experienced a haunting, a mysterious cryptid sighting, or a brush with the inexplicable, please share it with Canadian author Dorah L. Williams at dorahlwilliams@gmail.com
Your story, too, could be featured in an upcoming column of Mystical Manitoulin!
