September 20, 2022 • 62 mins
Author WT Watson is back once again to talk about his newest book Canadian Monsters & Mysteries! Flora welcomes WT Watson back for some great tales and lore from his book Canadian Monsters & Mysteries, available now! Covering a huge variety of subject matter, Travis' book runs the gamut from cryptids to UFOs and even some surprises in between. Canada is not the first place you'd think of for fae folk, but Travis proves us wrong. It also does not come to mind for mer-folk, yet... Check out the interview and then check out Travis' book. And while you're at it, check out another episode of Blurry Photos featuring Travis and his other works! Find Canadian Monsters & Mysteries on Amazon! Don't forget to check out Travis' book Mysteries in the Mist Biography from Amazon W. T. Watson is a coffee addict and writer of both fiction and non-fiction. He infuses his work with his expertise in cryptozoology, monster lore, magic, Forteana and the paranormal. W.T. brings a unique shamanic and magical perspective to all his work after over 30 years of exploration in these topics. When he is not writing or reading about monsters, he can be found outdoors allowing his dogs to take him for a walk around his neighborhood in Kitchener, Ontario. He lives with his spouse, Stacey, in a townhome that would be jammed with books if it weren’t for e-readers. Social Media Links https://www.facebook.com/blackdog60 https://twitter.com/WTWatson2 https://www.instagram.com/curunir60/ https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16154993.W_T_Watson Kindle Purchase Link: CM&M Kindle Edition
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Episode Transcript
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(00:14):
Hello, and welcome to Blurry Putos. I'm your host, Heyvid Flora.
On this episode, we welcome backauthor Travis Watson, who returns to the
show to talk about his new book, Canadian Monsters and Mysteries and exploration of
high strangeness in the Great White North. Here is my interview with Travis Watson.
Enjoy. We welcome back Travis Watson, author of Canadian Monsters and Mysteries.
(00:44):
Travis, welcome back. You aredangerously close to getting yourself a free
iced coffee. For how many timesyou've come here. I'll tell you what.
I'm starting to feel like I spendmore time with headphones on than I
do in front of my computer.Sometimes, well's pay it all for you,
man. This is this is thelatest from you. Tell me a
(01:04):
little bit about it. This stuffas a research you've done in addition to
the other books that you've written,or is this a special thing you've worked
on. Did it come out ofthe other research? It's actually, you
know, a standalone project. Imoved to Canada in twenty twenty. My
spouse got a job as a asa lecturer at the University of Waterloo,
(01:27):
which is quite a coup, quitea career coup because this is Waterloo is
basically the kind of the Mit ofCanada, or one of them anyway,
So they're they're doing their thing asa computer science lecturer. And I was
part of the reason that I've beenable to put out so many books in
(01:49):
the past couple of years is Ihave, you know, not been able
to work here until fairly recently,and now things are rolling along pretty well.
Also, you know, I'm kindof taking my time about returning to
the everyday workforce. So I movedto Canada and I looked around me and
(02:12):
I said, uh, well,you know, I'm a I'm a researcher
of all things weird. I wonderwhat kind of weird things there are in
Canada? Sure, And I quicklydiscovered, you know, as with mysteries
in the midst when I thought,gee, I wonder if fog and clouds
and stuff appear in the paranormal alot. Once I went down the rabbit
hole, I was like, ohmy goodness, there's there's so much stuff
(02:35):
that I literally had to cut largechunks of things out of the book.
You know, for instance, Idon't deal with sasquatch at all in this
book, because that's my next bookbasically is Sasquatching Canada. Yeah, you
know, I chose not to dothe the Lake Champlain Monster because that's been
very ably that's being very ably doneby somebody else. I also chose not
(02:59):
to do the Window Go for thesame reason. And Hauntings that may be
the book after this one, becausejust in Ontario alone, there are tons
of haunting you know, ghost stories, lots of history stuff. Um.
So you know, I touch onhauntings maybe a little bit in this book
with phantom trains and things like that, but fantom ships, but I don't
(03:22):
go full bore into you know,I went to this place and blah bla
blah, you know, all thatsort of stuff. So but even that
then, uh, you know,this book is another book like Mysteries in
the Myths. It has a widevariety of things that would interest people who
are interested in the paranormal m rangingfrom cryptids through UFOs. I do a
(03:46):
section on fairy lore um and Ieven close out with a section that's just
basically forty on a phantom fires orwhat do they call fire spooks fire spooks
um and uh and other rangness likethat. So as I got into the
research, I found all kinds ofinteresting things. The thing that really interested
(04:09):
me, though, was I hadto find a number of different sources because
a lot of the stories from Canadayou only find with Canadian authors. So
I had to explore a whole newset of writers, some of whom have
(04:30):
written some really fantastic work, butwe don't hear much about them in the
United States. So I thought thatwas pretty cool. Good example of that,
the guy named John Wormes has writtena fantastic book called Strange Creatures Seldom
Seen, which most people have probablynever heard of. It's a collect he
(04:56):
hails from. I'm not sure whetherhe's still alive or not, honestly,
but he was from Manitoba, Provinceof Manitoba. Here in Canada we have
provinces instead of states, and there'squite there are far fewer of them than
there are states. Oh yeah,So he hailed from Manitoba and apparently he
(05:16):
had connections in the First Nations communitiesof Manitoba, and so he wrote a
book that's a collection of cryptids sightingsfrom Canada, and some of which we'll
probably talk about, I hope we'lltalk about later because he gave up some
really interesting stuff. Yeah, butjust as an example of you know,
(05:42):
there's a couple of people, acouple of other people that I found that
were really really helpful in this research. And speaking of the First Nations sources,
as you say, John Worms hada lot to draw from. Did
you have any other First Nations sourcesthat you drew from or did you find
that, like in many places inAmerica, a lot of the indigenous peoples
(06:04):
don't really like to discuss this kindof lure. Yeah. Unfortunately, because
of the history of European colonization.You know, both in the US and
in Canada, Native people's are justnot likely to talk to somebody that they
don't know. Um, So Idid not. I do have you know,
(06:30):
of course, the John Worm's bookthat I just talked about, there's
also some newspaper articles of sightings ofthings that have been seen, uh,
you know in First Nations reserves theycall them reserves up here and reservations.
But directly no, um, Ididn't have any any direct sources, but
I certainly do cite Native people throughoutthe book. Yeah, and not to
(06:53):
mention the fact that a lot oftimes talking about something taboo like that is
bad as well to certain cultures becauseit invites that sort of bad negative energy.
Yeah, worms makes the point ofsaying that, you know, one
of the things that he had towork against and collecting these stories was,
(07:14):
on the one hand, you hadthese people who'd seen these incredible things and
and almost needed to talk to somebodyabout it. On the other hand,
the elders were very clear to themthat they should just forget this stuff and
walk away that you know, youdon't want to talk about this, you
don't want to dwell on it,you don't want to think about it.
(07:38):
You just want to go on aboutyour everyday life and let the mystery be
the mystery, basically, And sothey're very torn a lot of times telling
these stories. You know, yousee this a lot and amongst the Navajo,
for instance, the Denay when theytalk about skinwalkers. On the one
(07:59):
hand, and a lot of thesepeople, not a lot of these people.
Some of these people had these reallyincredible experiences with things that they cannot
explain, you know. But onthe other hand, there is a strong,
strong spiritual taboo about talking about thissubject at all because again, as
you say, you know, toname the thing is to attract its attention,
(08:22):
you know, so if they dotalk about it, they talk in
circles around it and don't actually andtry very hard not to refer to it
directly. You know, they'll talkabout how this thing was walking around on
their roof. You know, they'renot going to say I saw a skin
walker. You know, They'll they'llsay, well, you know, I
(08:43):
was driving down the road and thisthing was running along the road beside me.
They won't refer to it directly ifthey can help it. And we
see the same kind of thing happeningin Europe. You know, in an
earlier time, when European people talkabout the fairy folk, they would not
(09:03):
name the fairy folk. They hadall kinds of euphemisms for them so they
could avoid saying them saying the name, because saying the name attracted their attention.
And you know, not all fairywere you know, happy slappy,
you know, flying around waving theirwand and making colors kinds of creatures.
Some of them were pretty dangerous.Yeah, So these folks had learned how
(09:26):
to live with the spirits in theirland, and some of the native people
here. Yeah, and this tiesa little bit into a part in the
book where you mentioned where you wentto the Superstition Mountains in Arizona and had
the feeling that you got there right. Yeah, Well, you know,
I'm yeah, I've always been kindof one of those outdoors people, you
(09:48):
know. I like to hike anddo that sort of fan. I haven't
had as much of a chance todo it lately, but you know,
just because of busy schedule and such. But sure, back in the day
when I lived in Arizona, whichwas some time ago, over twenty years
ago, you know, I didhave a chance to visit the Superstitions since
(10:09):
they were right next to where Ilived. Basically I lived in Mace,
Arizona. And yeah, the Apachepeople of that area had very strong,
no no pun intended superstitions about thatmountain range in their legends, at least
in some tribes. It was itwas supposed to be the home of the
(10:31):
id Nahin, who were the thunderbeings of Apache lore. And there's something
special about that place. I willsay that just outright, you know,
just intuitively, walking paths and climbingmountains in that area, there's something different
(10:52):
about the Superstitions. It has adistinct feel to it. That you don't
I've not encountered anywhere else. Thereare places in those mountains where you really
probably shouldn't go. I had occasion, on at least one one time,
to walk into a side canyon offof a off of a path that I
(11:16):
was following up in the Superstition Range, and the experience was really bizarre because
it was a you know, it'sthe desert. It's a bright, sunshiny
day. The only time it's evernot bright and sunshiny in the in the
Arizona Desert is during what they euphemisticallyreferred to as the monsoon season, when
(11:37):
they get thunderstorms coming in from theBajai area. Yeah. Most of the
time, though, you know,the sky is blue and the sun is
beating down on you. I walkedinto this canyon and it was like I
had walked It's it's a kind ofthe same kind of feeling that some people
will describe walking into a cold spotand a haunted house. Yeah, it
seemed to me that the temperature dropped, you know, and of course this
(11:58):
is all perceptual stuff, right,but it seemed to me that the temperature
dropped and it seemed darker in thiscanyon. And it wasn't just the shade
from the canyon walls or that kindof thing. I took about five steps
into this thing, and I hada very clear, intuitive feeling that I
didn't belong there. Yeah, AndI was like, okay, all right,
(12:20):
I'm fine with that. I'm backingout now. You know, Sorry
I bothered you and I did,you know. I turned around and walked
right out, And as soon asI walked out of the out of that
area, everything returned to normal.Um. So you know, I there
are legends of people disappearing up there, yea, and that sort of thing.
(12:43):
And I'm not surprised because there's definitelysome sort of presence up there that
is not not happy, not amicablewith people. And I don't know whether
that's just people of European descent orwhether it's you know, everybody, Yeah,
you know, but definitely, II don't really want to know what
(13:09):
would have happened if I had beenhardheaded and decided that I was going to
walk back in that canyon. Youknow, right, we might not be
having an interview. It's entirely possible. Can you tell us about some places
like that in Canada that you layup in the book. Oh my goodness.
Um, so yeah, why don'twe just talk about the whole book
(13:31):
now? Starting on page one.I didn't focus so much on particular places
because there are well okay, sowe can go to one place. Um,
we can go to Nova Scotia.Oh yeah, okay um. And
there is a very good, uhfantom ship story from from Nova Scotia.
(13:54):
It's called the Fantom Ship of theNorthumberland Straight and uh, this one doesn't
like a lot of fantom ship storiesseem to have like an origin story,
you know, a ship went down, something happened, blah blah blah.
This particular one doesn't have an originstory that any of the authors that I
read could track down. But throughoutthe course of history in Nova Scotia,
(14:18):
since the settlement time, people havereported seeing a masted three rig sailing vessel
out in the Northumberland Strait on fire, and you know, they can actually
see figures moving around and so forth. This apparition is so realistic that a
(14:43):
rescue team launched from Charlottetown Harbor atone point. And this must have been
some time ago because they talk aboutrowing out there, but they rowed up
toward this toward this apparently burning vessel. They could see people running around.
They couldn't understand why nobody w isjumping overboard because the ship was obviously lost,
right, But they're they're looking atthis. They can actually feel the
(15:07):
heat of the flames as they're approachingthis, this apparition. But as they
get closer, suddenly it's enveloped infog, and then when the fog clears,
it disappears. When the writer whowho wrote about this started the section
on this on this Phantom talks abouttwo husband and wife who were staying in
(15:31):
a hotel in Nova Scotia and lookedout their window and they saw this,
this, this ship on fire inthe strait. They called the local Coastguard,
which handles water search and rescue herein Canada as much as they do
in the United States. They don'tdo so much law enforcement. They're more
of a search and rescue organization calledthe local Coastguard. Coastguard asking well,
(15:54):
what are you seeing and they describethis, you know, masted sailing vessel
blah blah blah, it was onfire. So on, and so part
says, oh, that's the that'sthe ghost ship out in the straight,
You're you're okay, it's all right, don't worry about it, don't worry
about it. Yeah, there's astory of a ferry boat, because there
are ferries that go back and forthbetween Nova Scotia and the mainland that actually
(16:15):
cited this thing, and they triedto get radar on it, and of
course they got no return. Butthey're all standing there looking at it,
going, oh, it's the fantomship of straight, you know, because
everybody in the area apparently knows thestory. Um. So it's it's a
it's a very uh. It's aninteresting I found a bit about the guys
rowing up to it and feeling theheat and that disappears was just wonderfully spooky.
(16:38):
Yeah. So you wonder what itis that actually caused that, you
know, because all of these fantomships type stories give you the impression that
there was some traumatic event as kindof the stone tape theory that imprinted itself
that keeps replaying over and over undercertain circumstan stances. You know, you
(17:02):
wonder what what horrible thing happened thatcaused this, uh, caused this phantom
to start appearing. But we're talkingabout spooky places too, um, you
have Nova Scotia or not Nova Scotia. I'm sorry. Prince Edward Island has
its own phantom train which which runskind of on the tracks around Wellington,
(17:26):
which is you know town in thatarea. Prince Edward Island's a little tiny
island that's its own province off thecoast of Canet's famous for its red beaches
and for I think it's Anne ofGreen Gables. But the Phantom train is
spooky because this is a thing thatpeople see on December evenings almost always in
(17:48):
December. Um they will actually seeit traveling traveling the tracks. They can
see lights on in the train,but there are no people. And when
folks have tried to come down offthe hill where they're looking down on this
thing and get closer to the tracksand where this thing appears, the people
(18:11):
that are close to the tracks can'tsee it, but the people who are
up on the hill still can.And really it's interesting because you know,
this is a this is a andit always stops at the same gate and
then it disappears. So this isinteresting because there are other phantom train stories
(18:34):
in that area where the phantom trainis cited for a certain period of time,
and then someone dies as a resultof a train accident. Someone dies,
and then the train doesn't appear anymore. It's almost like the train is
coming to pick up that that particularsoul, and then off it goes in
(18:55):
this particular phantom train, though itkeeps coming, you know. So some
so one wonders, you know Decemberin European folklore, you know that that
time between Salon approximately Halloween and Yule, the the the winter solstice, uh,
is a time when the dead aremost likely to walk the earth,
(19:18):
right, the restless dead, soto speak. And um, you know,
one wonders if if the you know, the train's not stopping to pick
some passengers, you know, takethem off to whatever version of the after
life they're going to. Uh.It's just incredibly a wonderfully spooky story.
Now was this the same one wherea conductor saw it had everybody bail out
(19:44):
of his own train. Yeah,now that wasn't that was that was in
another area of Canada entirely. Thatwas in Manitoba. Again, I think
it was Manitoba Medicine hat Yeah,pretty sure that's Manitoba. Um. So
in that story, conductor and hisfireman are on the train. He looks
(20:07):
up to see a train coming atthem on the same track, and of
course he's like, you know,he yells at the fireman, save yourself,
because there's no way he's going tomake it off of the train in
time, right, and so firemanbails out. He bails off of the
train. The train comes straight athim and then seems to divert off to
the side and go around him.Except there's no track there. Yeah,
(20:30):
there's no track there. So he'sso freaked out about it. His name
was Bob Tooey, if I remembercorrectly. He's so freaked out by this
incident that, you know, hedoesn't come into work for the next day.
It takes him a couple of daysto get his stuff together enough to
actually come back to work. Andthen he promptly requests a transfer to another
(20:52):
line. Apparently, and I don'tknow if this is a railroad worker superstition
or what, but apparently he sawthis as a death portant and so he
was scared to death, right,He thought, sure he was gonna gonna
die in a train accident. Sohe requests a transfer. He gets a
transfer to another location, another line. I'm still working for the same railroad
(21:18):
and so forth. The fellow whotakes over as conductor for the line that
he was on, the Lethridge line, I believe, has the same fireman.
The exact same thing happens to him. They're going down, minding their
own business, blah blah blah,see a train coming. It's like,
oh my god, we're going todie. And then it goes around them
(21:41):
on a track that doesn't exist.They testified that the train was lit on
the inside and they could actually seepassengers walking around inside this train. Right,
so super weird, right, Butyou know, this conductor tells twoy,
Hey, you know I had thesame thing happened to me, and
they're both like, oh, well, I guess they were okay, then,
(22:03):
you know whatever. The sad partof the story is that Bob too
was passed, was conducting one trainand this other conductor was conducting the Lethbridge
train, and unfortunately they did endup on the same tracks and had a
massive collision that killed you know,over ten railroad personnel just outside of medicine
(22:32):
hat. Apparently the collision was sointense that said that half the people in
medicine had actually heard heard the trainwreck so and both he both too,
He and the other conductor were killed. So in that case, the phantom
train seems to have been a deathportant. Yeah, and you know,
(22:56):
again, what kind of a youknow, is this a psychic experience that
happens to somebody prior to their death? You know, was somebody trying to
warm them? Um? You justhave to wonder what in the world was
going on that caused this very singularexperience to happen to two different people who
(23:21):
then ended up running into each otherliterally. Yeah. Yeah, it's just
a very very strange story. That'syou know, now of course a staple
and psychical lore here in Canada.Sure, yeah, and trying to warn
them to try and figure out howto make a train jump the track and
go around the train. You know, we'll just we'll just figure out a
(23:44):
way to switch the other train ontoa track it doesn't exist, and you
know, everything will be okay now, something that you know, it's it's
surprising, I think when someone hearsabout this section of the book, But
if you think about it, it'sreally not just because of the immigration,
the settlers, the colonization, butthere's a lot of fairy lore in the
(24:08):
book. Did that just pop upout of nowhere? For you? Were
you expecting to find that much?I had some indication. And now you
know, any time that you doresearch into the strange, you're always going
to have little things that pop upthat make you go, oh, wait
over there. And when I didMysteries in the Mist, I did include
(24:30):
a section on fairy and I didtalk a little bit about fairy story in
Canada. And honestly at this pointI don't remember which one is, but
that got me a particular source thatI referred to. There's a whole section
in the book on the fairy loreof Newfoundland which is devoted to a doctoral
(24:57):
project or doctoral dissertation, and itwas done by Barbara Ready, which is
called Strange Terrain. I think Idon't remember the name of the book right
off the top of my head,but I think it was a Strange Terrain
and it is about the fairy loreof Newfoundland. But let me back up
for Betty um Okay, the Nativepeople here in Canada have their own fairy
(25:18):
lore. They have they have whatthey call usually called little people, one
of the one of the terms that'sused for them. I'm going to take
a stab at this. I'm notsure exactly how it's pronounced as managishi.
So these are are little people.Um. They have a reputation reputation for
being more mischievous than anything else,but have been known to assist travelers and
(25:45):
that sort of thing, and they'regenerally depicted as just that being little people.
Um. John Worms has a greatstory out of Manitoba about a First
Nation's person who ran into not literallyreally, but who was driving a minivan
if I recall down the road andcited several of these Manichei creatures. But
(26:08):
the way that she describes them,I was thinking to myself, you know,
that sounds a whole lot like thefrog man from from Loveland, Loveland,
Ohio, because she described them asbeing sort of hopping as they moved
instead of walking. They sort ofhopped along. They had a skin that
(26:32):
was very slick and smooth and kindof a greenish color or greenish or grayish
color, and very smooth features andnot at all human looking. Right.
They they closely resembled the frog youknow, you had that sort So I
was thinking to myself, hmm,I wonder yeah, then you know my
(26:55):
mind goes down the rabbit hole andwonders. I wonder if the guy,
the police officer that saw the thingoriginally was actually a First Nation's perth.
Interesting, yeah, you know,because they do have their own fairy lore.
But as I say, for themost part, the manige she's supposed
to be, or the little peoplewhatever name they go by, because every
(27:18):
tribe seems to have a different namefor them. They're frequently associated with stones
as well, so they sometimes arecalled the stone people, which lines up
the Icelandic folklore about the holder folk, you know. So yeah, you
get all these cross reference things going. But to refer to back to the
lion's share of stuff, a lotof the fairy folklore of Canada is centered
(27:44):
in Nova Scotia, obviously New Scotland, and then in Newfoundland, which also
has a very strong Scottish Irish settlementproportion there. As I said, Riadi
wrote a whole book about the fairylaw of Newfoundland and that fairy lure is
fairy similar to what we see ifwe go read things like you know,
(28:10):
the Fairy Faith and Celtic Country byEvans wentz um Any of several of Catherine
briggs encyclopedic books on the fairy.A lot of the lore that you see
coming out of Newfoundland, the storiesthat you see coming out of Newfoundland are
very similar to the European fairy stories. So you have to wonder, you
(28:30):
know, it's like, okay,did did you know they just attached their
fairy lure to the existing spirits ofthat land or did they follow them the
follow them? I bring this outin the book. I happen to have
taken some seminars and had some correspondencewith a guy named r J. Stewart,
(28:53):
who is, for one of abetter term, a fairy seer.
He is an individual who actually workswith fairy spirits, fairy people, fairy
folk, whatever you want to callit. And RJ told me he goes
by Bob, but you know,call him RJ because that's how they actually,
(29:15):
that's how he writes. It's likecalling me WT Watson, right right.
So RJ actually told me that,you know, of course there were
these fairy healers and fairy seers wholived in Scotland, and of course some
of those people were caught up inthe forced migration to the New World UM
(29:36):
ended up in places like Appalachia,UM. You know, the British were
intent on breaking the the cultural historyof Scotland, and so they were just
shipping people out in mass and thenand then pulling English people in to replace
them. So these fairy seers wouldget sent over to the New World and
they would lose their fairy contacts fora period of time time, and then
(30:02):
over the course of time those contactswould re establish themselves on that side of
the world. So it's entirely possiblethat you know, whatever fairies are,
you know, and we can gointo you know, you can go into
all kinds of theories about that.But whatever fairies are, uh, they
may have actually followed the people thatthey knew, um. And so we
(30:26):
ended up with very similar fairy storiesin places like Newfoundland. UM. But
they did manage to put their ownspin on things. UM. For instance,
you know, it's it's it's knownthat there are in particularly in the
Celtic Lands, but throughout Europe thereit's known that and even in Iceland it's
(30:48):
known that the fairy have particular pathsthat they trought right and that you know,
putting a house or whatever on oneof those paths, UM is really
not a good idea because it's goingto result in chaos in your home,
ranging ranging from poltergeist type activities tojust bad luck, just general bad luck.
(31:11):
There's a story in Reaity about somepeople who situated their house on a
fairy path and could not have achild. They kept losing babies until they
moved. Until they moved out ofthat house and into a different location where,
you know where, they were perfectlysuccessful in having a family. The
(31:36):
other interesting thing about paths with fairiesin Newfoundland is that if you go walking
along a particular path that belongs tothe fairy, you may find yourself obstructed.
There's a story of a couple ofyoung ladies who were walking from Village
A to Village B, and theycame across a forest in a place where
(31:57):
there hadn't been a forest before.So of course this freaked them out a
little bit, and they're like,I don't know if we want to go
in there or not. So theywent back to the house that they came
from and they talked to the youknow, the authority that the ant or
mother or whoever it was, thatthe female figure who knew about these things,
and she blesses them with holy water, which is a classic method of
(32:22):
avoiding being taken by the fairy.She blesses them with holy water, and
then she gives them bread, andshe tells them, okay, you hold
when you get to the forest,you hold this in your left hand and
you just start handing bread out allaround you. Again, very classic European
motif, where in order to incurthe good, good feeling of the local
(32:47):
fairy, you give them all freaks. Right, So they go, they
come to this forest again, theystart to you know, handing out their
bread and so forth, and sureenough the forest disappears and they go on
about their way. So you giveoffering to the local ferry and they let
you pass. But the mom didthere, the aunt, I believe it
(33:07):
was an aunt, did comment that, uh, you know, you really
shouldn't take that path, that thenorth way is for the faery in the
south way is for people. Um. So they're like, okay, all
right, well we won't do thatagain. But yeah, but now we're
trying to go from point A topoint B the quickest that we can because
it's going to get dark. Sowe're we're gonna we're gonna do the offering
(33:30):
to the faery. You can getthrough there there was even uh, you
know, because one of the classicthings in fairy lower in Europe was the
idea of a changeling that the fairywould take a human infant and leave something
in its place, an old,wizened fairy that looked like a baby baby.
(33:52):
Um. And the story that Readehas came from one of her students
who collected it from somebody in theirtheir hometown. And this actually happened in
nineteen sixty eight. That these folkshad a fine, young, barn little
(34:15):
baby boy, if I recall,and uh, you know, very happy,
outgoing, you know, sort ofbaby, right, sort of baby
everybody loves, yeah, um.And one day this child just becomes the
sullen, you know, unhappy,crying, you know, wretched thing.
And of course they know the localfairy lore. They're like, we've been
(34:37):
gifted with a changeling here. Sothey tried a couple of different things,
but they and remember again this isnineteen sixty eight. Yeah, they ended
up with his baby on a shovelover an open fire and told the they
just held the baby out there andthey said, you know what, you
(34:58):
give us our kid back or we'redumping the changeling in the fire, and
sure enough, according to the story, baby on the shovel disappears and they
hear their own child crying in thehouse. So yeah, and then we
want to get into the whole alienabduction thing, right. You know,
(35:19):
you read Joshua Cutchens Thieves in theNight and you're like, nah, yeah,
okay, so maybe it's not alienthe changeling. To to defeat the
changelings, to switch them back,they're always such a brutal Oh yeah,
you have to do I have todo something really nasty in order to get
the ferry to take their their theirbeing back and give you your baby.
(35:44):
You know, you have to holdthem over a fire or shove a red
hot poker down their throat or somekind of really awful, terrible thing.
Yeah, or threatened to anyway,or threatened to. Yeah. My favorite
one is boiling eggshells. And it'snot even something brutal or something. It's
just a way to trick them becausethe change links so curious about it.
(36:06):
They stand up and what are youdoing? We got you alright, and
give you your baby. That's wild. Yeah, So that that was yeah,
I mean, you know, it'sone thing to read about that happening
(36:27):
in the you know, the eighteenhundreds or even the early early nineteen hundreds,
But in nineteen sixty eight, youfigure, a, yeah, nobody
believes in that stuff anymore, right, wrong, This stuff is steeped in
this and one other things tangential alittle bit to the faith focused stuff.
But something that surprised me was theamount of mur folk sightings. Oh yeah,
(36:52):
that are up there. Did thatsurprise you too? Yeah? Yeah,
I well, first of all,honestly, I'm not that conversant with
our folk, right, I thought, well, you know, I mean
there are stories about that, youknow, as I mentioned in the book,
I'd read John Michael Greer's book,and uh and uh, you know,
he talks about the mur folk asbeing you know, basically spirits of
(37:14):
the water or spirits of the seaor whatever, the type of faery basically.
But I had no idea, firstof all, that that it was
fairly common for Scottish people to seethese things, um, which I should
have known because I'm a scott Mymother was born in Glasgow, you know.
Um, you know, if youlook at my DNA, it's like
(37:36):
I'm so norm European. I shouldI should glow in the dark, right,
Um. But yeah, um,there are sightings of what we would
call murder people both on the onthe ocean, um in Atlanta, Canada,
and then more interestingly in the lakesin Canada, which you're not lacking
(38:00):
four yeah, which we are definitelynot lacking for. There's there's there's thousands.
Is one of the things that peopledon't know about. Canada's sent the
second largest country in the world firstof all, and it has well over
ten thousand lakes that are over threesquare kilometers. Yeah. Yeah, so
it's there's just thousands and thousands.Let's say you can't go anywhere with already
(38:21):
into water in this place, youknow, I mean because I I'm you
know, I'm in between two lakeshere in Kitchener and you know, two
great lakes. Um. And thenthere's you know Lake Simco that's up off
to the north, and there's justlakes everywhere. So Lake Superior, you
know, which is famous for um, you know, the Edmund Fitzgerald and
(38:44):
the sinking of the Edmondsphere Serald.But there's a story from Lake Superior of
a explorer in the in the colonialperiod who encountered one of these beings on
the lake. Um was observing fora while and then decided that he was
going to shoot it. So hepicks his rifle up and his Native American
(39:07):
companion goes Native Canadian companion goes completelynuts and basically, you know, attacks
him and starts, you know,pumbling him and wrestling the rifle away from
him. He's like, what iswrong with you? And she's like,
are you mad? You know,don't you know what happens if you provoke
(39:28):
one of the gods of the lakesand waters? And he's like, well,
no, what happens? She says, well, you'll find out,
and she bails out. She getsoff the boat and leaves. Right.
He and his men were like,oh, okay, wheredo, you know
whatever strange native folklore or whatever youknow, blah blah blah, you know,
typical European arrogance. Right, Sothey set up set up camp on
(39:51):
the shore of the lake and thatnight a massive storm blows in and it
is all that they can do,you know, the wind and the rain
and you know, the water isactually rising. The wind is blowing so
hard it's actually pushing the lake upthe shoreline toward them, they have to
move their camp back a good distancein order to keep from from losing all
(40:15):
their supplies and drowning. Now,if you know anything about murh folk lore,
one of the things that is saidto happen if you provoke one of
these beings is storms. So youknow, obviously this First Nations person knew
what she was talking about. Now, the thing that really interested me about
(40:35):
the mur Folks stories, though,was John Worms Again. Wonderful, wonderful
book. I can't recommend this bookenough if you're interested at all in Canadian
mysteries monsters, you know, whetherit's sasquatch or any of the other weirder
things that hopefully we'll get a chanceto talk about. Has a whole section
on First Nations people who encounter mermaidsor murman And the interesting thing about this
(41:01):
is that the Native people in Manitobawho encounter these things almost invariably describe them
as being white people with not justwhite, but with red hair, red
or blonde hair. Yeah, there'sthere's a story of a young lady who
(41:22):
liked to She and her companions woulddive in the water and they would see
who could swim underwater. For thelongest, and she was like the champ
at this um. She dove underthe water in one of the local lakes
that she was close to at thattime, and encountered this, this blonde
mermaid under the water, and shewould she would never ever after that go
(41:46):
into the deep water in any ofthe lakes. Yeah, I mean,
this thing affected her so strongly becauseyou know, again we had that that
first nation's attitude about encountering a mystery, you know, and it's it's something
safe, acrid, it's something youdon't want to talk about, it's on
and so forth. Right, Soshe encountered this being that was, you
(42:06):
know, basically a blonde Caucasian personfrom the waist up and a fish from
the waist down. Go figure,you know, And she's and she's not,
and she's not the only one.There were you know, a group
of Native girls who were walking alonga path. They spotted you know,
this person in the off the distance. Apparently they only saw like the upper
(42:31):
part of her. And they sawthis person sitting on a rock out next
to the lake. Right, It'slike, what the heck is she doing
out here? You know, what'sthis? What's this? What basically,
what is this lone white girl doingthe native reserved right. So they take
the path, and the path apparentlydiverges from the shore of the lake for
a little bit and then comes backdown to the shore of the lake,
right around the stone where this personwas sitting. And they come out and
(42:55):
they find this redheaded Caucasian and beingsitting on a stone, you know,
apparently very contem contemplatively. But thebottom half of this person was a fish,
and when she spies them, shejumps into water and disappeared. Now,
(43:15):
why would First Nations people see Caucasianmermaids? Yeah, that that was
the thing that puzzled me, youknow, I mean, I suppose it's
possible that that they you know,that they picked these stories up, you
know, culturally from from the Europeansettlers, and you know, it was
(43:37):
a thing. It was an egrevoire, you know, it's formed of
you know, a sort of atulpa or fought form um. I suppose
that's possible, or maybe, youknow, maybe the European mermaids followed their
people over uh, you know,because you can access a lot of the
lakes in Canada from the seat,Yeah, in one way or the other.
(44:00):
You know, and then you canget into the river systems and you
can go anywhere you want. Imean there's a reason why, you know,
birch bark canoes and so forth forso popular as transportation. It's in
Canada, they're like ATVs. Yeah, pretty much you can go just about
anywhere you want it. You know. What it reminds me of is um
(44:20):
the scene in Peter Pan which Ibelieve he talks about mermaids with the different
color hair blonde, red, maybea purple one or something. And guess
where J. M. Barry wasfrom? Scotland, Scotland. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, I mean justa little could be a peg on the
corkboard you dover know, you know, I mean yeah, but Scotland is
(44:44):
like the capital of mr folks sidings, they still have them, you know.
Yeah, So it's not beyond therealm of possibility that you know,
if the ferry from Europe, youknow, followed their over here, then
maybe the murph folk did too.I mean, we don't know really what
(45:06):
the the idea for, you know, if the native people. I didn't
run across anything that said that thenative people had any sort of an indigenous
water spirit, so I just thoughtthat was really interesting. And both of
these sightings were of beings that appearedto be completely solid, you know,
So it's like, yeah, Ithought that I had encountered something physical and
(45:29):
I'm sure disturbed the water and thingslike you know when they jumps in the
water and splash us and all thatkind of fun stuff. Well, you
mentioned it. There's such a greatvariety in this book, and you know,
we we barely scratched the surface.But I was wondering if there were
anything topic wise that you research thatyou found particularly fascinating or fun to research.
(45:52):
Oh yeah, uh, you know, there's a lot of jokes about
you know, Canadians and beavers andstuff, you know, and moose and
that kind of thing. John Wormsgives us some great stories. But we're
gonna I'm gonna back up for justa second. So Worms got interested in
(46:15):
this phenomena of tunnels being found,particularly on First Nation's land, and there
are these mysterious tunnels or about youknow, three feet or so why and
very smooth sided. It looked likelike lava tubes basically. But there's there's
no volcanic activity in that area,in those areas at all, right,
(46:37):
So he got interested in when wherethese things come from. He's you know,
he talks to the geologists and he'sdoing all this stuff and he finally
he says to the native some ofhis native contacts, he says, what
do you know about these tunnels?And they're very matter of factly tell him,
oh, well that's where the giantsnakes live. And he's like what,
(46:58):
yeah, yeah, yeah, wehave giants snakes up here. You
know, they tend to live closeto the lakes. It's like, uh,
So he started collecting giant snake storiesand there are just to back up
again, he talked to herpetologists,the people who do reptiles right, and
they told him there is no waythat a snake over four or five feet
(47:22):
long could survive in Canada. Justwon't happen. It can't, can't happen,
right, But he had these nativepeople telling him. For instance,
he talked to two firefighters who wereout you know, they do preventive fire
maintenance stuff, make firebreaks and stufflike that. They were doing a firebreak.
They are maintaining a firebreak, andthey encountered a snake that stretched from
(47:44):
one end one side of the fireat break to the other so this thing
was well over twenty feet long.Now they were considering what to do,
and one of them was like,hey, we could take an axe and
cut this thing in half, andyou know we'd probably be famous. You
know. The other one's like,no, no, no, no,
this is one of those mysteries theelders were telling us about. We're not
(48:06):
going to mess with this thing.Right, So the snake slithers on its
way and goes off. You know, there are stories of snakes in the
water that actually bump people's boats outof the way, and we're longer than
the boat. There's even a storyof a snake that that popped its head
out of the water, you know, near another boat that had antlers.
(48:28):
So it's like there's all of thesestories from all through the First Nations areas
in Canada of these giant snakes we'retalking about you know, we're not talking
a plus plus sized garter snake.We're talking about a snake that's twenty feet
or more long, some of themestimated at fifty feet. It's like the
(48:49):
Titana Boas stories that you get outof South America, right, So Warrems
is like giant snakes. Okay,so he's collecting giant snake stories, but
he's still concerned about these tunnels andhow big were the tunnels? Did he
mention that they were quite long?Um, he didn't give an exact dimension,
but they would go along for aconsiderable distance, so big enough to
(49:13):
house the giant snake in. Right. So he comes back to his native
contacts. He says, Okay,snakes don't really burrow. They can sort
of shovel with their nose and stuff. Certain snakes can, but they kid,
they don't really burrow. He says, who dug the holes? You
know who dug the tunnels? Oh, well that was the giant beavers.
(49:36):
And again they're very matter of factabout this. It's like Native people are
very matter of fact about sasquatch.Right, It's like, oh, yeah,
they exist. So harry Man's outthere in the forest. He does
this thing. We do our thing. We don't bother him. You know,
same thing there there are so wormsis like giant beavers. It's like,
oh yeah, we have these beaversthat they're the size of bears and
(49:58):
they're you know, people see themember once in a while, and sometimes
you know, somebody who's out huntingwill come across a beaver lodge that's the
size of a house. Um,and you know they live in there,
and you know they're giant beavers.So he starts collecting stories of giant beavers
as well. And you know henot only did these things apparently exist on
(50:20):
you know, these native lands,but um, you know sometimes people will
encounter them. They could be alittle aggressive. Yeah, there's at least
one story where a guy got outof the got out of the car.
He thought he was going to goand he saw this beaver off in the
distance, right. He thought hewas going to go and get some lunch.
And he comes out with a baseballbat and he's gonna go get this
beaver. And he realizes to getcloser to this thing that is bigger than
(50:42):
he is, and it chases itback to the car, you know,
shuffling along behind him, making weirdbeaver noises right, scarce the but Jesus
out of him. Right, there'sa picture in strange creatures seldom seen.
Somebody apparently did a carving of one. Is the statue of one of these
things, and worms is standing nextto it with his arm rap over the
(51:04):
shoulders. This giant beaver that's like, you know, the size of him.
You know, there's stories of youknow, Native women out you know,
picking berries, which apparently is areally dangerous occupation because you know,
either you run into giant beavers oryou run into sasquatch. Right there are
falling a snake ale out. Sothey're out picking berries and uh, they
(51:29):
hear something in the bush and theyexpect a bear to come out, right
because it's black bear country. Ohit wasn't a bear. It was a
beaver the size of a bear.And it made its way off toward the
lake and splashed into the water andswum away. They're like, okay,
we just saw a giant beaver.Now. The interesting thing about this story
(51:52):
is that there actually was a speciesof giant beaver called Castords Ohio insus that
lived in that area and a littlesouth about ten thousand years ago. So
geologically speaking, dropping the bucket now, Canada is a place where you could
(52:14):
hide darn near anything. They actuallyCanada has its own Lazarus species, the
wood bison, which was declared extinct. This is literally the largest land animal
in North America right by weight,not hight by weight. Declared extinct in
the early nineteen hundreds and rediscovered youknow, very much alive. Heard of
(52:37):
two hundred in nineteen fifty seven byan Alberta wildlife officer who was doing an
overflight of the air of an areaand saw this herd of buffalo running beneath
it, you know, extinct animals. So they managed to hide, you
know, two thousand pound bison inthe forest for decades. There's no telling
(52:59):
what's wonder right, It's not abovethe realm of possibility that there could actually
be a relict population of these Castoridi'sgiant beavers, right, Yeah, And
what makes it even more interesting isthat worms actually saw one of these things.
(53:19):
He had gone to investigate a giantbeaver story and decided that he was
going to camp out along the riverwhere this thing was seen. Right.
He didn't think that he was goingto see anything really, right, He
just thought, you know, heck, it would be fun, you know,
I'm going to camp out along theriver and see if anything happens.
(53:39):
Right. Sure enough, he's sittingthere, you know, doing his camping
thing, and this football sized headpops out of the water next to him,
and he says this thing was sixor seven feet long without the tail.
I mean it was huge, sogiant beavers. That was probably my
(54:00):
favorite story in the book because it'sjust so it's so Canadian, right,
yeah, and more Canadian if thesethings were swimming around a maple syrup,
I guess, yeah, absolutely,it was just it was just so very
Canadian that I just I had tolaugh, you know, as I was
(54:21):
reading some of these accounts. Butobviously people are seeing these things, you
know, And I again, whatpeople don't realize is that not only is
Canada the second largest country in theworld, but ninety some percent of the
population of Canada lives within a hundredmiles of the US border. So you
have vast swaths of wilderness that arealmost completely untouched. You know, if
(54:46):
you want to go there, youhave to to rent a plane with pontoons
and fly in and land on alake because there's no there's no other way
to get there. And that kindof wilderness starts two hours from where I'm
sitting. Wild Um, so it'sit's very very uh you know, in
(55:10):
the brush here is dense. Imean, it's it's not like not like
walking in the forest of Arizona,for instance, where you have you know,
this pine needle bed, you knowof the ponderosa pines and pine needle
bed, and there's these big spacesbetween the trees, right, there's undergrowth
everywhere in the growing season. It'svery very dense, very thick, and
(55:35):
you know, difficult to get through. Um. So you know, it's
kind of discourages people from going trampingaround there unless there's a good trail to
follow, right, perfect though tohide. Oh yeah, these cryptids maybe
relict all kinds of stuff. Andagain to the listeners, it's it's there's
such a dearth of topics that Traviscovers in the book Cryptids. As we
(56:00):
mentioned just some of the mysteries,my favorite part, the forty Ana stuff
that you talk about, some ofthe phantom trains of ships, UFOs,
whole big sections on UFOs of Fairylore. Just I mean, we we've talked
for an hour now and barely scratchthe surface. So I do encourage people
(56:22):
to check this out. It issomething that, as you point out in
the book, Travis, a lotof Americans don't aren't aren't very privy too,
because it's only Canadian writers that arewriting about it. A lot of
that stuff doesn't get down here.To us. So this is um.
There's stuff that people are familiar withfrom the Shag Harbor incident. You mentioned
(56:43):
Falcon Leake, which I've covered before, and the origins of the Old Mary
Celeste even but there's so many morethings that people have I would bet never
heard of. So yeah, it'sit's a great work that you've put together
here, And I bet you coulddo several volumes if you really wanted to,
if I really wanted to. Ohyeah, you know, like I
(57:07):
said, I've got I have oneproject in the works right now. The
lore of Sasquatch is rife with stories, you know, that are told by
American authors, and so the onlyonly place in Canada that exists for these
folks for the most part is BritishColumbia. And what I discovered very quickly
(57:30):
when I started doing research on Canadianstrangeness was that I couldn't find I can't
think right off the top of myhead of a province that hasn't had a
sasquatch sighting. Yeah, maybe noneof it, Maybe none of it up
in the Arctic area, unless youwant to blame the Angie Cooney Lake disappearance
(57:51):
on a never know. But soMy next project is a book on Sasquatch
and the Sasquatching Canada beyond BC.Nice because again, um, you know,
there's plenty of data. You know, there's plenty of citing information and
so forth, but there's not there'snot much cognizance of it south of the
(58:15):
border. It's like it's almost likea lot of people in the United States
believe that, you know, onceyou cross the Canadian border, there's just
this giant ice flow that stretches upto the art and you know, and
nobody lives up here, right Um, I apocryphal story, but I've been
told that, you know, Canadianborder security has actually had people driving into
(58:39):
Canada in the summertime with cross countryskis on the top of their cars because
they thought they would need them uphere. Wow. Um, and not
not really. It's it's pretty warmhere right now. So he's saying this
while sitting there in a sleeveless Tshirt. By the way, Yeah,
yeah, it is pretty warm today. It's the twenty seven degrees celsius.
(59:01):
So yeah, we think that comesout to about eighty four Fahrenheim,
which not as hot as some placesin the US, but it's it's pretty
warm. It's up there, it'swarm to us. Yeah, it's enough
for me too. Yeah, Ihad to move to the mountains. Yeah.
So it's very much the case thata lot of these stories, you
(59:24):
know, like I said the two, there's there's plenty of great hauntings up
here too. Yeah, that I'mprobably am going to look at at some
point as well. But it's verymuch the case that it's understandable because there's
a ton of stuff in the UnitedStates to investigate, but there's also a
ton of stuff up here to investigate, and I'm looking forward to getting my
(59:47):
nose into some of that. Excellent, excellent, Well, I appreciate you
taking the time to come and talkwith us again and tell everybody remind them
where to go pick up this book, where to find more of your work,
including the other stuff we've talked about, Phantom Dogs, Mysteries in the
Mist, things like that. Soat this point I have three books in
(01:00:07):
print, nonfiction books in print,I should say, the Phantom Black Dogs,
Walker's a Liminal Way, Mysteries inthe Mist, Missed Fogs and Clouds
in the Paranormal, and then thisnew one is Canadian Monsters and Mysteries.
All of them are available on Amazon. All of them are available as either
paperback or Kindle, and if youwere a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, they are
(01:00:30):
available on Kindle Unlimited. If youwant to interact with me, you know,
on a more personal level. I'mavailable on Facebook, Twitter, and
Instagram. That that that picture thing. I have WT Watson author page on
Facebook. I'm at Twitter at wtWatson two. And then the weird one
(01:00:55):
is Instagram. It's an old handleof mine. It's Coreneers see you are
you and I R sixty So youcan find me in those places. And
I'm always happy to hear from people. I've actually had a couple of people
contact me with witness accounts. Ohnice. So that's always fun to have
(01:01:15):
a chance to talk to somebody who'sseen something something interesting. So that's that's
how to get hold of me.That's the easiest way to get hold of
me. I highly encourage people todo so and check out all these books.
It's it's just a good time.Always fun to talk to you,
Travis. Thanks again for coming onBlurry Photos. Well, thanks so much
for having me. Thanks once againto Travis for stopping by. I'll have
(01:01:39):
links to where to find the bookin the show notes. Thanks for listening
to this episode of Blurry Photos.I have been David, the giant beaver.
Flora don't stop blur even
Hello, and welcome to Blurry Putos. I'm your host, Heyvid Flora.
On this episode, we welcome backauthor Travis Watson, who returns to the
show to talk about his new book, Canadian Monsters and Mysteries and exploration of
high strangeness in the Great White North. Here is my interview with Travis Watson.
Enjoy. We welcome back Travis Watson, author of Canadian Monsters and Mysteries.
(00:44):
Travis, welcome back. You aredangerously close to getting yourself a free
iced coffee. For how many timesyou've come here. I'll tell you what.
I'm starting to feel like I spendmore time with headphones on than I
do in front of my computer.Sometimes, well's pay it all for you,
man. This is this is thelatest from you. Tell me a
(01:04):
little bit about it. This stuffas a research you've done in addition to
the other books that you've written,or is this a special thing you've worked
on. Did it come out ofthe other research? It's actually, you
know, a standalone project. Imoved to Canada in twenty twenty. My
spouse got a job as a asa lecturer at the University of Waterloo,
(01:27):
which is quite a coup, quitea career coup because this is Waterloo is
basically the kind of the Mit ofCanada, or one of them anyway,
So they're they're doing their thing asa computer science lecturer. And I was
part of the reason that I've beenable to put out so many books in
(01:49):
the past couple of years is Ihave, you know, not been able
to work here until fairly recently,and now things are rolling along pretty well.
Also, you know, I'm kindof taking my time about returning to
the everyday workforce. So I movedto Canada and I looked around me and
(02:12):
I said, uh, well,you know, I'm a I'm a researcher
of all things weird. I wonderwhat kind of weird things there are in
Canada? Sure, And I quicklydiscovered, you know, as with mysteries
in the midst when I thought,gee, I wonder if fog and clouds
and stuff appear in the paranormal alot. Once I went down the rabbit
hole, I was like, ohmy goodness, there's there's so much stuff
(02:35):
that I literally had to cut largechunks of things out of the book.
You know, for instance, Idon't deal with sasquatch at all in this
book, because that's my next bookbasically is Sasquatching Canada. Yeah, you
know, I chose not to dothe the Lake Champlain Monster because that's been
very ably that's being very ably doneby somebody else. I also chose not
(02:59):
to do the Window Go for thesame reason. And Hauntings that may be
the book after this one, becausejust in Ontario alone, there are tons
of haunting you know, ghost stories, lots of history stuff. Um.
So you know, I touch onhauntings maybe a little bit in this book
with phantom trains and things like that, but fantom ships, but I don't
(03:22):
go full bore into you know,I went to this place and blah bla
blah, you know, all thatsort of stuff. So but even that
then, uh, you know,this book is another book like Mysteries in
the Myths. It has a widevariety of things that would interest people who
are interested in the paranormal m rangingfrom cryptids through UFOs. I do a
(03:46):
section on fairy lore um and Ieven close out with a section that's just
basically forty on a phantom fires orwhat do they call fire spooks fire spooks
um and uh and other rangness likethat. So as I got into the
research, I found all kinds ofinteresting things. The thing that really interested
(04:09):
me, though, was I hadto find a number of different sources because
a lot of the stories from Canadayou only find with Canadian authors. So
I had to explore a whole newset of writers, some of whom have
(04:30):
written some really fantastic work, butwe don't hear much about them in the
United States. So I thought thatwas pretty cool. Good example of that,
the guy named John Wormes has writtena fantastic book called Strange Creatures Seldom
Seen, which most people have probablynever heard of. It's a collect he
(04:56):
hails from. I'm not sure whetherhe's still alive or not, honestly,
but he was from Manitoba, Provinceof Manitoba. Here in Canada we have
provinces instead of states, and there'squite there are far fewer of them than
there are states. Oh yeah,So he hailed from Manitoba and apparently he
(05:16):
had connections in the First Nations communitiesof Manitoba, and so he wrote a
book that's a collection of cryptids sightingsfrom Canada, and some of which we'll
probably talk about, I hope we'lltalk about later because he gave up some
really interesting stuff. Yeah, butjust as an example of you know,
(05:42):
there's a couple of people, acouple of other people that I found that
were really really helpful in this research. And speaking of the First Nations sources,
as you say, John Worms hada lot to draw from. Did
you have any other First Nations sourcesthat you drew from or did you find
that, like in many places inAmerica, a lot of the indigenous peoples
(06:04):
don't really like to discuss this kindof lure. Yeah. Unfortunately, because
of the history of European colonization.You know, both in the US and
in Canada, Native people's are justnot likely to talk to somebody that they
don't know. Um, So Idid not. I do have you know,
(06:30):
of course, the John Worm's bookthat I just talked about, there's
also some newspaper articles of sightings ofthings that have been seen, uh,
you know in First Nations reserves theycall them reserves up here and reservations.
But directly no, um, Ididn't have any any direct sources, but
I certainly do cite Native people throughoutthe book. Yeah, and not to
(06:53):
mention the fact that a lot oftimes talking about something taboo like that is
bad as well to certain cultures becauseit invites that sort of bad negative energy.
Yeah, worms makes the point ofsaying that, you know, one
of the things that he had towork against and collecting these stories was,
(07:14):
on the one hand, you hadthese people who'd seen these incredible things and
and almost needed to talk to somebodyabout it. On the other hand,
the elders were very clear to themthat they should just forget this stuff and
walk away that you know, youdon't want to talk about this, you
don't want to dwell on it,you don't want to think about it.
(07:38):
You just want to go on aboutyour everyday life and let the mystery be
the mystery, basically, And sothey're very torn a lot of times telling
these stories. You know, yousee this a lot and amongst the Navajo,
for instance, the Denay when theytalk about skinwalkers. On the one
(07:59):
hand, and a lot of thesepeople, not a lot of these people.
Some of these people had these reallyincredible experiences with things that they cannot
explain, you know. But onthe other hand, there is a strong,
strong spiritual taboo about talking about thissubject at all because again, as
you say, you know, toname the thing is to attract its attention,
(08:22):
you know, so if they dotalk about it, they talk in
circles around it and don't actually andtry very hard not to refer to it
directly. You know, they'll talkabout how this thing was walking around on
their roof. You know, they'renot going to say I saw a skin
walker. You know, They'll they'llsay, well, you know, I
(08:43):
was driving down the road and thisthing was running along the road beside me.
They won't refer to it directly ifthey can help it. And we
see the same kind of thing happeningin Europe. You know, in an
earlier time, when European people talkabout the fairy folk, they would not
(09:03):
name the fairy folk. They hadall kinds of euphemisms for them so they
could avoid saying them saying the name, because saying the name attracted their attention.
And you know, not all fairywere you know, happy slappy,
you know, flying around waving theirwand and making colors kinds of creatures.
Some of them were pretty dangerous.Yeah, So these folks had learned how
(09:26):
to live with the spirits in theirland, and some of the native people
here. Yeah, and this tiesa little bit into a part in the
book where you mentioned where you wentto the Superstition Mountains in Arizona and had
the feeling that you got there right. Yeah, Well, you know,
I'm yeah, I've always been kindof one of those outdoors people, you
(09:48):
know. I like to hike anddo that sort of fan. I haven't
had as much of a chance todo it lately, but you know,
just because of busy schedule and such. But sure, back in the day
when I lived in Arizona, whichwas some time ago, over twenty years
ago, you know, I didhave a chance to visit the Superstitions since
(10:09):
they were right next to where Ilived. Basically I lived in Mace,
Arizona. And yeah, the Apachepeople of that area had very strong,
no no pun intended superstitions about thatmountain range in their legends, at least
in some tribes. It was itwas supposed to be the home of the
(10:31):
id Nahin, who were the thunderbeings of Apache lore. And there's something
special about that place. I willsay that just outright, you know,
just intuitively, walking paths and climbingmountains in that area, there's something different
(10:52):
about the Superstitions. It has adistinct feel to it. That you don't
I've not encountered anywhere else. Thereare places in those mountains where you really
probably shouldn't go. I had occasion, on at least one one time,
to walk into a side canyon offof a off of a path that I
(11:16):
was following up in the Superstition Range, and the experience was really bizarre because
it was a you know, it'sthe desert. It's a bright, sunshiny
day. The only time it's evernot bright and sunshiny in the in the
Arizona Desert is during what they euphemisticallyreferred to as the monsoon season, when
(11:37):
they get thunderstorms coming in from theBajai area. Yeah. Most of the
time, though, you know,the sky is blue and the sun is
beating down on you. I walkedinto this canyon and it was like I
had walked It's it's a kind ofthe same kind of feeling that some people
will describe walking into a cold spotand a haunted house. Yeah, it
seemed to me that the temperature dropped, you know, and of course this
(11:58):
is all perceptual stuff, right,but it seemed to me that the temperature
dropped and it seemed darker in thiscanyon. And it wasn't just the shade
from the canyon walls or that kindof thing. I took about five steps
into this thing, and I hada very clear, intuitive feeling that I
didn't belong there. Yeah, AndI was like, okay, all right,
(12:20):
I'm fine with that. I'm backingout now. You know, Sorry
I bothered you and I did,you know. I turned around and walked
right out, And as soon asI walked out of the out of that
area, everything returned to normal.Um. So you know, I there
are legends of people disappearing up there, yea, and that sort of thing.
(12:43):
And I'm not surprised because there's definitelysome sort of presence up there that
is not not happy, not amicablewith people. And I don't know whether
that's just people of European descent orwhether it's you know, everybody, Yeah,
you know, but definitely, II don't really want to know what
(13:09):
would have happened if I had beenhardheaded and decided that I was going to
walk back in that canyon. Youknow, right, we might not be
having an interview. It's entirely possible. Can you tell us about some places
like that in Canada that you layup in the book. Oh my goodness.
Um, so yeah, why don'twe just talk about the whole book
(13:31):
now? Starting on page one.I didn't focus so much on particular places
because there are well okay, sowe can go to one place. Um,
we can go to Nova Scotia.Oh yeah, okay um. And
there is a very good, uhfantom ship story from from Nova Scotia.
(13:54):
It's called the Fantom Ship of theNorthumberland Straight and uh, this one doesn't
like a lot of fantom ship storiesseem to have like an origin story,
you know, a ship went down, something happened, blah blah blah.
This particular one doesn't have an originstory that any of the authors that I
read could track down. But throughoutthe course of history in Nova Scotia,
(14:18):
since the settlement time, people havereported seeing a masted three rig sailing vessel
out in the Northumberland Strait on fire, and you know, they can actually
see figures moving around and so forth. This apparition is so realistic that a
(14:43):
rescue team launched from Charlottetown Harbor atone point. And this must have been
some time ago because they talk aboutrowing out there, but they rowed up
toward this toward this apparently burning vessel. They could see people running around.
They couldn't understand why nobody w isjumping overboard because the ship was obviously lost,
right, But they're they're looking atthis. They can actually feel the
(15:07):
heat of the flames as they're approachingthis, this apparition. But as they
get closer, suddenly it's enveloped infog, and then when the fog clears,
it disappears. When the writer whowho wrote about this started the section
on this on this Phantom talks abouttwo husband and wife who were staying in
(15:31):
a hotel in Nova Scotia and lookedout their window and they saw this,
this, this ship on fire inthe strait. They called the local Coastguard,
which handles water search and rescue herein Canada as much as they do
in the United States. They don'tdo so much law enforcement. They're more
of a search and rescue organization calledthe local Coastguard. Coastguard asking well,
(15:54):
what are you seeing and they describethis, you know, masted sailing vessel
blah blah blah, it was onfire. So on, and so part
says, oh, that's the that'sthe ghost ship out in the straight,
You're you're okay, it's all right, don't worry about it, don't worry
about it. Yeah, there's astory of a ferry boat, because there
are ferries that go back and forthbetween Nova Scotia and the mainland that actually
(16:15):
cited this thing, and they triedto get radar on it, and of
course they got no return. Butthey're all standing there looking at it,
going, oh, it's the fantomship of straight, you know, because
everybody in the area apparently knows thestory. Um. So it's it's a
it's a very uh. It's aninteresting I found a bit about the guys
rowing up to it and feeling theheat and that disappears was just wonderfully spooky.
(16:38):
Yeah. So you wonder what itis that actually caused that, you
know, because all of these fantomships type stories give you the impression that
there was some traumatic event as kindof the stone tape theory that imprinted itself
that keeps replaying over and over undercertain circumstan stances. You know, you
(17:02):
wonder what what horrible thing happened thatcaused this, uh, caused this phantom
to start appearing. But we're talkingabout spooky places too, um, you
have Nova Scotia or not Nova Scotia. I'm sorry. Prince Edward Island has
its own phantom train which which runskind of on the tracks around Wellington,
(17:26):
which is you know town in thatarea. Prince Edward Island's a little tiny
island that's its own province off thecoast of Canet's famous for its red beaches
and for I think it's Anne ofGreen Gables. But the Phantom train is
spooky because this is a thing thatpeople see on December evenings almost always in
(17:48):
December. Um they will actually seeit traveling traveling the tracks. They can
see lights on in the train,but there are no people. And when
folks have tried to come down offthe hill where they're looking down on this
thing and get closer to the tracksand where this thing appears, the people
(18:11):
that are close to the tracks can'tsee it, but the people who are
up on the hill still can.And really it's interesting because you know,
this is a this is a andit always stops at the same gate and
then it disappears. So this isinteresting because there are other phantom train stories
(18:34):
in that area where the phantom trainis cited for a certain period of time,
and then someone dies as a resultof a train accident. Someone dies,
and then the train doesn't appear anymore. It's almost like the train is
coming to pick up that that particularsoul, and then off it goes in
(18:55):
this particular phantom train, though itkeeps coming, you know. So some
so one wonders, you know Decemberin European folklore, you know that that
time between Salon approximately Halloween and Yule, the the the winter solstice, uh,
is a time when the dead aremost likely to walk the earth,
(19:18):
right, the restless dead, soto speak. And um, you know,
one wonders if if the you know, the train's not stopping to pick
some passengers, you know, takethem off to whatever version of the after
life they're going to. Uh.It's just incredibly a wonderfully spooky story.
Now was this the same one wherea conductor saw it had everybody bail out
(19:44):
of his own train. Yeah,now that wasn't that was that was in
another area of Canada entirely. Thatwas in Manitoba. Again, I think
it was Manitoba Medicine hat Yeah,pretty sure that's Manitoba. Um. So
in that story, conductor and hisfireman are on the train. He looks
(20:07):
up to see a train coming atthem on the same track, and of
course he's like, you know,he yells at the fireman, save yourself,
because there's no way he's going tomake it off of the train in
time, right, and so firemanbails out. He bails off of the
train. The train comes straight athim and then seems to divert off to
the side and go around him.Except there's no track there. Yeah,
(20:30):
there's no track there. So he'sso freaked out about it. His name
was Bob Tooey, if I remembercorrectly. He's so freaked out by this
incident that, you know, hedoesn't come into work for the next day.
It takes him a couple of daysto get his stuff together enough to
actually come back to work. Andthen he promptly requests a transfer to another
(20:52):
line. Apparently, and I don'tknow if this is a railroad worker superstition
or what, but apparently he sawthis as a death portant and so he
was scared to death, right,He thought, sure he was gonna gonna
die in a train accident. Sohe requests a transfer. He gets a
transfer to another location, another line. I'm still working for the same railroad
(21:18):
and so forth. The fellow whotakes over as conductor for the line that
he was on, the Lethridge line, I believe, has the same fireman.
The exact same thing happens to him. They're going down, minding their
own business, blah blah blah,see a train coming. It's like,
oh my god, we're going todie. And then it goes around them
(21:41):
on a track that doesn't exist.They testified that the train was lit on
the inside and they could actually seepassengers walking around inside this train. Right,
so super weird, right, Butyou know, this conductor tells twoy,
Hey, you know I had thesame thing happened to me, and
they're both like, oh, well, I guess they were okay, then,
(22:03):
you know whatever. The sad partof the story is that Bob too
was passed, was conducting one trainand this other conductor was conducting the Lethbridge
train, and unfortunately they did endup on the same tracks and had a
massive collision that killed you know,over ten railroad personnel just outside of medicine
(22:32):
hat. Apparently the collision was sointense that said that half the people in
medicine had actually heard heard the trainwreck so and both he both too,
He and the other conductor were killed. So in that case, the phantom
train seems to have been a deathportant. Yeah, and you know,
(22:56):
again, what kind of a youknow, is this a psychic experience that
happens to somebody prior to their death? You know, was somebody trying to
warm them? Um? You justhave to wonder what in the world was
going on that caused this very singularexperience to happen to two different people who
(23:21):
then ended up running into each otherliterally. Yeah. Yeah, it's just
a very very strange story. That'syou know, now of course a staple
and psychical lore here in Canada.Sure, yeah, and trying to warn
them to try and figure out howto make a train jump the track and
go around the train. You know, we'll just we'll just figure out a
(23:44):
way to switch the other train ontoa track it doesn't exist, and you
know, everything will be okay now, something that you know, it's it's
surprising, I think when someone hearsabout this section of the book, But
if you think about it, it'sreally not just because of the immigration,
the settlers, the colonization, butthere's a lot of fairy lore in the
(24:08):
book. Did that just pop upout of nowhere? For you? Were
you expecting to find that much?I had some indication. And now you
know, any time that you doresearch into the strange, you're always going
to have little things that pop upthat make you go, oh, wait
over there. And when I didMysteries in the Mist, I did include
(24:30):
a section on fairy and I didtalk a little bit about fairy story in
Canada. And honestly at this pointI don't remember which one is, but
that got me a particular source thatI referred to. There's a whole section
in the book on the fairy loreof Newfoundland which is devoted to a doctoral
(24:57):
project or doctoral dissertation, and itwas done by Barbara Ready, which is
called Strange Terrain. I think Idon't remember the name of the book right
off the top of my head,but I think it was a Strange Terrain
and it is about the fairy loreof Newfoundland. But let me back up
for Betty um Okay, the Nativepeople here in Canada have their own fairy
(25:18):
lore. They have they have whatthey call usually called little people, one
of the one of the terms that'sused for them. I'm going to take
a stab at this. I'm notsure exactly how it's pronounced as managishi.
So these are are little people.Um. They have a reputation reputation for
being more mischievous than anything else,but have been known to assist travelers and
(25:45):
that sort of thing, and they'regenerally depicted as just that being little people.
Um. John Worms has a greatstory out of Manitoba about a First
Nation's person who ran into not literallyreally, but who was driving a minivan
if I recall down the road andcited several of these Manichei creatures. But
(26:08):
the way that she describes them,I was thinking to myself, you know,
that sounds a whole lot like thefrog man from from Loveland, Loveland,
Ohio, because she described them asbeing sort of hopping as they moved
instead of walking. They sort ofhopped along. They had a skin that
(26:32):
was very slick and smooth and kindof a greenish color or greenish or grayish
color, and very smooth features andnot at all human looking. Right.
They they closely resembled the frog youknow, you had that sort So I
was thinking to myself, hmm,I wonder yeah, then you know my
(26:55):
mind goes down the rabbit hole andwonders. I wonder if the guy,
the police officer that saw the thingoriginally was actually a First Nation's perth.
Interesting, yeah, you know,because they do have their own fairy lore.
But as I say, for themost part, the manige she's supposed
to be, or the little peoplewhatever name they go by, because every
(27:18):
tribe seems to have a different namefor them. They're frequently associated with stones
as well, so they sometimes arecalled the stone people, which lines up
the Icelandic folklore about the holder folk, you know. So yeah, you
get all these cross reference things going. But to refer to back to the
lion's share of stuff, a lotof the fairy folklore of Canada is centered
(27:44):
in Nova Scotia, obviously New Scotland, and then in Newfoundland, which also
has a very strong Scottish Irish settlementproportion there. As I said, Riadi
wrote a whole book about the fairylaw of Newfoundland and that fairy lure is
fairy similar to what we see ifwe go read things like you know,
(28:10):
the Fairy Faith and Celtic Country byEvans wentz um Any of several of Catherine
briggs encyclopedic books on the fairy.A lot of the lore that you see
coming out of Newfoundland, the storiesthat you see coming out of Newfoundland are
very similar to the European fairy stories. So you have to wonder, you
(28:30):
know, it's like, okay,did did you know they just attached their
fairy lure to the existing spirits ofthat land or did they follow them the
follow them? I bring this outin the book. I happen to have
taken some seminars and had some correspondencewith a guy named r J. Stewart,
(28:53):
who is, for one of abetter term, a fairy seer.
He is an individual who actually workswith fairy spirits, fairy people, fairy
folk, whatever you want to callit. And RJ told me he goes
by Bob, but you know,call him RJ because that's how they actually,
(29:15):
that's how he writes. It's likecalling me WT Watson, right right.
So RJ actually told me that,you know, of course there were
these fairy healers and fairy seers wholived in Scotland, and of course some
of those people were caught up inthe forced migration to the New World UM
(29:36):
ended up in places like Appalachia,UM. You know, the British were
intent on breaking the the cultural historyof Scotland, and so they were just
shipping people out in mass and thenand then pulling English people in to replace
them. So these fairy seers wouldget sent over to the New World and
they would lose their fairy contacts fora period of time time, and then
(30:02):
over the course of time those contactswould re establish themselves on that side of
the world. So it's entirely possiblethat you know, whatever fairies are,
you know, and we can gointo you know, you can go into
all kinds of theories about that.But whatever fairies are, uh, they
may have actually followed the people thatthey knew, um. And so we
(30:26):
ended up with very similar fairy storiesin places like Newfoundland. UM. But
they did manage to put their ownspin on things. UM. For instance,
you know, it's it's it's knownthat there are in particularly in the
Celtic Lands, but throughout Europe thereit's known that and even in Iceland it's
(30:48):
known that the fairy have particular pathsthat they trought right and that you know,
putting a house or whatever on oneof those paths, UM is really
not a good idea because it's goingto result in chaos in your home,
ranging ranging from poltergeist type activities tojust bad luck, just general bad luck.
(31:11):
There's a story in Reaity about somepeople who situated their house on a
fairy path and could not have achild. They kept losing babies until they
moved. Until they moved out ofthat house and into a different location where,
you know where, they were perfectlysuccessful in having a family. The
(31:36):
other interesting thing about paths with fairiesin Newfoundland is that if you go walking
along a particular path that belongs tothe fairy, you may find yourself obstructed.
There's a story of a couple ofyoung ladies who were walking from Village
A to Village B, and theycame across a forest in a place where
(31:57):
there hadn't been a forest before.So of course this freaked them out a
little bit, and they're like,I don't know if we want to go
in there or not. So theywent back to the house that they came
from and they talked to the youknow, the authority that the ant or
mother or whoever it was, thatthe female figure who knew about these things,
and she blesses them with holy water, which is a classic method of
(32:22):
avoiding being taken by the fairy.She blesses them with holy water, and
then she gives them bread, andshe tells them, okay, you hold
when you get to the forest,you hold this in your left hand and
you just start handing bread out allaround you. Again, very classic European
motif, where in order to incurthe good, good feeling of the local
(32:47):
fairy, you give them all freaks. Right, So they go, they
come to this forest again, theystart to you know, handing out their
bread and so forth, and sureenough the forest disappears and they go on
about their way. So you giveoffering to the local ferry and they let
you pass. But the mom didthere, the aunt, I believe it
(33:07):
was an aunt, did comment that, uh, you know, you really
shouldn't take that path, that thenorth way is for the faery in the
south way is for people. Um. So they're like, okay, all
right, well we won't do thatagain. But yeah, but now we're
trying to go from point A topoint B the quickest that we can because
it's going to get dark. Sowe're we're gonna we're gonna do the offering
(33:30):
to the faery. You can getthrough there there was even uh, you
know, because one of the classicthings in fairy lower in Europe was the
idea of a changeling that the fairywould take a human infant and leave something
in its place, an old,wizened fairy that looked like a baby baby.
(33:52):
Um. And the story that Readehas came from one of her students
who collected it from somebody in theirtheir hometown. And this actually happened in
nineteen sixty eight. That these folkshad a fine, young, barn little
(34:15):
baby boy, if I recall,and uh, you know, very happy,
outgoing, you know, sort ofbaby, right, sort of baby
everybody loves, yeah, um.And one day this child just becomes the
sullen, you know, unhappy,crying, you know, wretched thing.
And of course they know the localfairy lore. They're like, we've been
(34:37):
gifted with a changeling here. Sothey tried a couple of different things,
but they and remember again this isnineteen sixty eight. Yeah, they ended
up with his baby on a shovelover an open fire and told the they
just held the baby out there andthey said, you know what, you
(34:58):
give us our kid back or we'redumping the changeling in the fire, and
sure enough, according to the story, baby on the shovel disappears and they
hear their own child crying in thehouse. So yeah, and then we
want to get into the whole alienabduction thing, right. You know,
(35:19):
you read Joshua Cutchens Thieves in theNight and you're like, nah, yeah,
okay, so maybe it's not alienthe changeling. To to defeat the
changelings, to switch them back,they're always such a brutal Oh yeah,
you have to do I have todo something really nasty in order to get
the ferry to take their their theirbeing back and give you your baby.
(35:44):
You know, you have to holdthem over a fire or shove a red
hot poker down their throat or somekind of really awful, terrible thing.
Yeah, or threatened to anyway,or threatened to. Yeah. My favorite
one is boiling eggshells. And it'snot even something brutal or something. It's
just a way to trick them becausethe change links so curious about it.
(36:06):
They stand up and what are youdoing? We got you alright, and
give you your baby. That's wild. Yeah, So that that was yeah,
I mean, you know, it'sone thing to read about that happening
(36:27):
in the you know, the eighteenhundreds or even the early early nineteen hundreds,
But in nineteen sixty eight, youfigure, a, yeah, nobody
believes in that stuff anymore, right, wrong, This stuff is steeped in
this and one other things tangential alittle bit to the faith focused stuff.
But something that surprised me was theamount of mur folk sightings. Oh yeah,
(36:52):
that are up there. Did thatsurprise you too? Yeah? Yeah,
I well, first of all,honestly, I'm not that conversant with
our folk, right, I thought, well, you know, I mean
there are stories about that, youknow, as I mentioned in the book,
I'd read John Michael Greer's book,and uh and uh, you know,
he talks about the mur folk asbeing you know, basically spirits of
(37:14):
the water or spirits of the seaor whatever, the type of faery basically.
But I had no idea, firstof all, that that it was
fairly common for Scottish people to seethese things, um, which I should
have known because I'm a scott Mymother was born in Glasgow, you know.
Um, you know, if youlook at my DNA, it's like
(37:36):
I'm so norm European. I shouldI should glow in the dark, right,
Um. But yeah, um,there are sightings of what we would
call murder people both on the onthe ocean, um in Atlanta, Canada,
and then more interestingly in the lakesin Canada, which you're not lacking
(38:00):
four yeah, which we are definitelynot lacking for. There's there's there's thousands.
Is one of the things that peopledon't know about. Canada's sent the
second largest country in the world firstof all, and it has well over
ten thousand lakes that are over threesquare kilometers. Yeah. Yeah, so
it's there's just thousands and thousands.Let's say you can't go anywhere with already
(38:21):
into water in this place, youknow, I mean because I I'm you
know, I'm in between two lakeshere in Kitchener and you know, two
great lakes. Um. And thenthere's you know Lake Simco that's up off
to the north, and there's justlakes everywhere. So Lake Superior, you
know, which is famous for um, you know, the Edmund Fitzgerald and
(38:44):
the sinking of the Edmondsphere Serald.But there's a story from Lake Superior of
a explorer in the in the colonialperiod who encountered one of these beings on
the lake. Um was observing fora while and then decided that he was
going to shoot it. So hepicks his rifle up and his Native American
(39:07):
companion goes Native Canadian companion goes completelynuts and basically, you know, attacks
him and starts, you know,pumbling him and wrestling the rifle away from
him. He's like, what iswrong with you? And she's like,
are you mad? You know,don't you know what happens if you provoke
(39:28):
one of the gods of the lakesand waters? And he's like, well,
no, what happens? She says, well, you'll find out,
and she bails out. She getsoff the boat and leaves. Right.
He and his men were like,oh, okay, wheredo, you know
whatever strange native folklore or whatever youknow, blah blah blah, you know,
typical European arrogance. Right, Sothey set up set up camp on
(39:51):
the shore of the lake and thatnight a massive storm blows in and it
is all that they can do,you know, the wind and the rain
and you know, the water isactually rising. The wind is blowing so
hard it's actually pushing the lake upthe shoreline toward them, they have to
move their camp back a good distancein order to keep from from losing all
(40:15):
their supplies and drowning. Now,if you know anything about murh folk lore,
one of the things that is saidto happen if you provoke one of
these beings is storms. So youknow, obviously this First Nations person knew
what she was talking about. Now, the thing that really interested me about
(40:35):
the mur Folks stories, though,was John Worms Again. Wonderful, wonderful
book. I can't recommend this bookenough if you're interested at all in Canadian
mysteries monsters, you know, whetherit's sasquatch or any of the other weirder
things that hopefully we'll get a chanceto talk about. Has a whole section
on First Nations people who encounter mermaidsor murman And the interesting thing about this
(41:01):
is that the Native people in Manitobawho encounter these things almost invariably describe them
as being white people with not justwhite, but with red hair, red
or blonde hair. Yeah, there'sthere's a story of a young lady who
(41:22):
liked to She and her companions woulddive in the water and they would see
who could swim underwater. For thelongest, and she was like the champ
at this um. She dove underthe water in one of the local lakes
that she was close to at thattime, and encountered this, this blonde
mermaid under the water, and shewould she would never ever after that go
(41:46):
into the deep water in any ofthe lakes. Yeah, I mean,
this thing affected her so strongly becauseyou know, again we had that that
first nation's attitude about encountering a mystery, you know, and it's it's something
safe, acrid, it's something youdon't want to talk about, it's on
and so forth. Right, Soshe encountered this being that was, you
(42:06):
know, basically a blonde Caucasian personfrom the waist up and a fish from
the waist down. Go figure,you know, And she's and she's not,
and she's not the only one.There were you know, a group
of Native girls who were walking alonga path. They spotted you know,
this person in the off the distance. Apparently they only saw like the upper
(42:31):
part of her. And they sawthis person sitting on a rock out next
to the lake. Right, It'slike, what the heck is she doing
out here? You know, what'sthis? What's this? What basically,
what is this lone white girl doingthe native reserved right. So they take
the path, and the path apparentlydiverges from the shore of the lake for
a little bit and then comes backdown to the shore of the lake,
right around the stone where this personwas sitting. And they come out and
(42:55):
they find this redheaded Caucasian and beingsitting on a stone, you know,
apparently very contem contemplatively. But thebottom half of this person was a fish,
and when she spies them, shejumps into water and disappeared. Now,
(43:15):
why would First Nations people see Caucasianmermaids? Yeah, that that was
the thing that puzzled me, youknow, I mean, I suppose it's
possible that that they you know,that they picked these stories up, you
know, culturally from from the Europeansettlers, and you know, it was
(43:37):
a thing. It was an egrevoire, you know, it's formed of
you know, a sort of atulpa or fought form um. I suppose
that's possible, or maybe, youknow, maybe the European mermaids followed their
people over uh, you know,because you can access a lot of the
lakes in Canada from the seat,Yeah, in one way or the other.
(44:00):
You know, and then you canget into the river systems and you
can go anywhere you want. Imean there's a reason why, you know,
birch bark canoes and so forth forso popular as transportation. It's in
Canada, they're like ATVs. Yeah, pretty much you can go just about
anywhere you want it. You know. What it reminds me of is um
(44:20):
the scene in Peter Pan which Ibelieve he talks about mermaids with the different
color hair blonde, red, maybea purple one or something. And guess
where J. M. Barry wasfrom? Scotland, Scotland. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, I mean justa little could be a peg on the
corkboard you dover know, you know, I mean yeah, but Scotland is
(44:44):
like the capital of mr folks sidings, they still have them, you know.
Yeah, So it's not beyond therealm of possibility that you know,
if the ferry from Europe, youknow, followed their over here, then
maybe the murph folk did too.I mean, we don't know really what
(45:06):
the the idea for, you know, if the native people. I didn't
run across anything that said that thenative people had any sort of an indigenous
water spirit, so I just thoughtthat was really interesting. And both of
these sightings were of beings that appearedto be completely solid, you know,
So it's like, yeah, Ithought that I had encountered something physical and
(45:29):
I'm sure disturbed the water and thingslike you know when they jumps in the
water and splash us and all thatkind of fun stuff. Well, you
mentioned it. There's such a greatvariety in this book, and you know,
we we barely scratched the surface.But I was wondering if there were
anything topic wise that you research thatyou found particularly fascinating or fun to research.
(45:52):
Oh yeah, uh, you know, there's a lot of jokes about
you know, Canadians and beavers andstuff, you know, and moose and
that kind of thing. John Wormsgives us some great stories. But we're
gonna I'm gonna back up for justa second. So Worms got interested in
(46:15):
this phenomena of tunnels being found,particularly on First Nation's land, and there
are these mysterious tunnels or about youknow, three feet or so why and
very smooth sided. It looked likelike lava tubes basically. But there's there's
no volcanic activity in that area,in those areas at all, right,
(46:37):
So he got interested in when wherethese things come from. He's you know,
he talks to the geologists and he'sdoing all this stuff and he finally
he says to the native some ofhis native contacts, he says, what
do you know about these tunnels?And they're very matter of factly tell him,
oh, well that's where the giantsnakes live. And he's like what,
(46:58):
yeah, yeah, yeah, wehave giants snakes up here. You
know, they tend to live closeto the lakes. It's like, uh,
So he started collecting giant snake storiesand there are just to back up
again, he talked to herpetologists,the people who do reptiles right, and
they told him there is no waythat a snake over four or five feet
(47:22):
long could survive in Canada. Justwon't happen. It can't, can't happen,
right, But he had these nativepeople telling him. For instance,
he talked to two firefighters who wereout you know, they do preventive fire
maintenance stuff, make firebreaks and stufflike that. They were doing a firebreak.
They are maintaining a firebreak, andthey encountered a snake that stretched from
(47:44):
one end one side of the fireat break to the other so this thing
was well over twenty feet long.Now they were considering what to do,
and one of them was like,hey, we could take an axe and
cut this thing in half, andyou know we'd probably be famous. You
know. The other one's like,no, no, no, no,
this is one of those mysteries theelders were telling us about. We're not
(48:06):
going to mess with this thing.Right, So the snake slithers on its
way and goes off. You know, there are stories of snakes in the
water that actually bump people's boats outof the way, and we're longer than
the boat. There's even a storyof a snake that that popped its head
out of the water, you know, near another boat that had antlers.
(48:28):
So it's like there's all of thesestories from all through the First Nations areas
in Canada of these giant snakes we'retalking about you know, we're not talking
a plus plus sized garter snake.We're talking about a snake that's twenty feet
or more long, some of themestimated at fifty feet. It's like the
(48:49):
Titana Boas stories that you get outof South America, right, So Warrems
is like giant snakes. Okay,so he's collecting giant snake stories, but
he's still concerned about these tunnels andhow big were the tunnels? Did he
mention that they were quite long?Um, he didn't give an exact dimension,
but they would go along for aconsiderable distance, so big enough to
(49:13):
house the giant snake in. Right. So he comes back to his native
contacts. He says, Okay,snakes don't really burrow. They can sort
of shovel with their nose and stuff. Certain snakes can, but they kid,
they don't really burrow. He says, who dug the holes? You
know who dug the tunnels? Oh, well that was the giant beavers.
(49:36):
And again they're very matter of factabout this. It's like Native people are
very matter of fact about sasquatch.Right, It's like, oh, yeah,
they exist. So harry Man's outthere in the forest. He does
this thing. We do our thing. We don't bother him. You know,
same thing there there are so wormsis like giant beavers. It's like,
oh yeah, we have these beaversthat they're the size of bears and
(49:58):
they're you know, people see themember once in a while, and sometimes
you know, somebody who's out huntingwill come across a beaver lodge that's the
size of a house. Um,and you know they live in there,
and you know they're giant beavers.So he starts collecting stories of giant beavers
as well. And you know henot only did these things apparently exist on
(50:20):
you know, these native lands,but um, you know sometimes people will
encounter them. They could be alittle aggressive. Yeah, there's at least
one story where a guy got outof the got out of the car.
He thought he was going to goand he saw this beaver off in the
distance, right. He thought hewas going to go and get some lunch.
And he comes out with a baseballbat and he's gonna go get this
beaver. And he realizes to getcloser to this thing that is bigger than
(50:42):
he is, and it chases itback to the car, you know,
shuffling along behind him, making weirdbeaver noises right, scarce the but Jesus
out of him. Right, there'sa picture in strange creatures seldom seen.
Somebody apparently did a carving of one. Is the statue of one of these
things, and worms is standing nextto it with his arm rap over the
(51:04):
shoulders. This giant beaver that's like, you know, the size of him.
You know, there's stories of youknow, Native women out you know,
picking berries, which apparently is areally dangerous occupation because you know,
either you run into giant beavers oryou run into sasquatch. Right there are
falling a snake ale out. Sothey're out picking berries and uh, they
(51:29):
hear something in the bush and theyexpect a bear to come out, right
because it's black bear country. Ohit wasn't a bear. It was a
beaver the size of a bear.And it made its way off toward the
lake and splashed into the water andswum away. They're like, okay,
we just saw a giant beaver.Now. The interesting thing about this story
(51:52):
is that there actually was a speciesof giant beaver called Castords Ohio insus that
lived in that area and a littlesouth about ten thousand years ago. So
geologically speaking, dropping the bucket now, Canada is a place where you could
(52:14):
hide darn near anything. They actuallyCanada has its own Lazarus species, the
wood bison, which was declared extinct. This is literally the largest land animal
in North America right by weight,not hight by weight. Declared extinct in
the early nineteen hundreds and rediscovered youknow, very much alive. Heard of
(52:37):
two hundred in nineteen fifty seven byan Alberta wildlife officer who was doing an
overflight of the air of an areaand saw this herd of buffalo running beneath
it, you know, extinct animals. So they managed to hide, you
know, two thousand pound bison inthe forest for decades. There's no telling
(52:59):
what's wonder right, It's not abovethe realm of possibility that there could actually
be a relict population of these Castoridi'sgiant beavers, right, Yeah, And
what makes it even more interesting isthat worms actually saw one of these things.
(53:19):
He had gone to investigate a giantbeaver story and decided that he was
going to camp out along the riverwhere this thing was seen. Right.
He didn't think that he was goingto see anything really, right, He
just thought, you know, heck, it would be fun, you know,
I'm going to camp out along theriver and see if anything happens.
(53:39):
Right. Sure enough, he's sittingthere, you know, doing his camping
thing, and this football sized headpops out of the water next to him,
and he says this thing was sixor seven feet long without the tail.
I mean it was huge, sogiant beavers. That was probably my
(54:00):
favorite story in the book because it'sjust so it's so Canadian, right,
yeah, and more Canadian if thesethings were swimming around a maple syrup,
I guess, yeah, absolutely,it was just it was just so very
Canadian that I just I had tolaugh, you know, as I was
(54:21):
reading some of these accounts. Butobviously people are seeing these things, you
know, And I again, whatpeople don't realize is that not only is
Canada the second largest country in theworld, but ninety some percent of the
population of Canada lives within a hundredmiles of the US border. So you
have vast swaths of wilderness that arealmost completely untouched. You know, if
(54:46):
you want to go there, youhave to to rent a plane with pontoons
and fly in and land on alake because there's no there's no other way
to get there. And that kindof wilderness starts two hours from where I'm
sitting. Wild Um, so it'sit's very very uh you know, in
(55:10):
the brush here is dense. Imean, it's it's not like not like
walking in the forest of Arizona,for instance, where you have you know,
this pine needle bed, you knowof the ponderosa pines and pine needle
bed, and there's these big spacesbetween the trees, right, there's undergrowth
everywhere in the growing season. It'svery very dense, very thick, and
(55:35):
you know, difficult to get through. Um. So you know, it's
kind of discourages people from going trampingaround there unless there's a good trail to
follow, right, perfect though tohide. Oh yeah, these cryptids maybe
relict all kinds of stuff. Andagain to the listeners, it's it's there's
such a dearth of topics that Traviscovers in the book Cryptids. As we
(56:00):
mentioned just some of the mysteries,my favorite part, the forty Ana stuff
that you talk about, some ofthe phantom trains of ships, UFOs,
whole big sections on UFOs of Fairylore. Just I mean, we we've talked
for an hour now and barely scratchthe surface. So I do encourage people
(56:22):
to check this out. It issomething that, as you point out in
the book, Travis, a lotof Americans don't aren't aren't very privy too,
because it's only Canadian writers that arewriting about it. A lot of
that stuff doesn't get down here.To us. So this is um.
There's stuff that people are familiar withfrom the Shag Harbor incident. You mentioned
(56:43):
Falcon Leake, which I've covered before, and the origins of the Old Mary
Celeste even but there's so many morethings that people have I would bet never
heard of. So yeah, it'sit's a great work that you've put together
here, And I bet you coulddo several volumes if you really wanted to,
if I really wanted to. Ohyeah, you know, like I
(57:07):
said, I've got I have oneproject in the works right now. The
lore of Sasquatch is rife with stories, you know, that are told by
American authors, and so the onlyonly place in Canada that exists for these
folks for the most part is BritishColumbia. And what I discovered very quickly
(57:30):
when I started doing research on Canadianstrangeness was that I couldn't find I can't
think right off the top of myhead of a province that hasn't had a
sasquatch sighting. Yeah, maybe noneof it, Maybe none of it up
in the Arctic area, unless youwant to blame the Angie Cooney Lake disappearance
(57:51):
on a never know. But soMy next project is a book on Sasquatch
and the Sasquatching Canada beyond BC.Nice because again, um, you know,
there's plenty of data. You know, there's plenty of citing information and
so forth, but there's not there'snot much cognizance of it south of the
(58:15):
border. It's like it's almost likea lot of people in the United States
believe that, you know, onceyou cross the Canadian border, there's just
this giant ice flow that stretches upto the art and you know, and
nobody lives up here, right Um, I apocryphal story, but I've been
told that, you know, Canadianborder security has actually had people driving into
(58:39):
Canada in the summertime with cross countryskis on the top of their cars because
they thought they would need them uphere. Wow. Um, and not
not really. It's it's pretty warmhere right now. So he's saying this
while sitting there in a sleeveless Tshirt. By the way, Yeah,
yeah, it is pretty warm today. It's the twenty seven degrees celsius.
(59:01):
So yeah, we think that comesout to about eighty four Fahrenheim,
which not as hot as some placesin the US, but it's it's pretty
warm. It's up there, it'swarm to us. Yeah, it's enough
for me too. Yeah, Ihad to move to the mountains. Yeah.
So it's very much the case thata lot of these stories, you
(59:24):
know, like I said the two, there's there's plenty of great hauntings up
here too. Yeah, that I'mprobably am going to look at at some
point as well. But it's verymuch the case that it's understandable because there's
a ton of stuff in the UnitedStates to investigate, but there's also a
ton of stuff up here to investigate, and I'm looking forward to getting my
(59:47):
nose into some of that. Excellent, excellent, Well, I appreciate you
taking the time to come and talkwith us again and tell everybody remind them
where to go pick up this book, where to find more of your work,
including the other stuff we've talked about, Phantom Dogs, Mysteries in the
Mist, things like that. Soat this point I have three books in
(01:00:07):
print, nonfiction books in print,I should say, the Phantom Black Dogs,
Walker's a Liminal Way, Mysteries inthe Mist, Missed Fogs and Clouds
in the Paranormal, and then thisnew one is Canadian Monsters and Mysteries.
All of them are available on Amazon. All of them are available as either
paperback or Kindle, and if youwere a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, they are
(01:00:30):
available on Kindle Unlimited. If youwant to interact with me, you know,
on a more personal level. I'mavailable on Facebook, Twitter, and
Instagram. That that that picture thing. I have WT Watson author page on
Facebook. I'm at Twitter at wtWatson two. And then the weird one
(01:00:55):
is Instagram. It's an old handleof mine. It's Coreneers see you are
you and I R sixty So youcan find me in those places. And
I'm always happy to hear from people. I've actually had a couple of people
contact me with witness accounts. Ohnice. So that's always fun to have
(01:01:15):
a chance to talk to somebody who'sseen something something interesting. So that's that's
how to get hold of me.That's the easiest way to get hold of
me. I highly encourage people todo so and check out all these books.
It's it's just a good time.Always fun to talk to you,
Travis. Thanks again for coming onBlurry Photos. Well, thanks so much
for having me. Thanks once againto Travis for stopping by. I'll have
(01:01:39):
links to where to find the bookin the show notes. Thanks for listening
to this episode of Blurry Photos.I have been David, the giant beaver.
Flora don't stop blur even
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