The ghosts and wee beasties of a magic Muskoka –
A glimpse beyond and below the reality we choose to accept

There are some folks here in the hinterland of Ontario, who look up at brand new balconied condominiums and utter words like, “isn’t this beautiful,” and “they’re just so enchanting.” Others look at another new urban subdivision, sprawling out toward the formerly treed horizon here in Muskoka, and suggest, “I would give anything to live here.” Well that’s true. What was given up happened to be the life-saving forest we apparently didn’t require as much as speculation housing and capitalist fortitude.
I grew up in a small town urban neighborhood called Hunt’s Hill (situated in north-east Bracebridge) that had only several postage-stamp size green-belts for us kids to hide-away. Two out of three were privately owned but no one ever ordered us off. Across from our apartment on Alice Street, was a small wooded lot abutting a mom and pop cottage rental business and corner store, owned by Fred Bamford, bless his kindly soul. The thick and thriving woodlot at the back of his property was a great source of inspiration to me over the four seasons, as a fledgling writer, taking an early stab at short story authordom, and then later a modest foray into poetry.
I couldn’t wait in the morning to climb out of bed and see what was happening in Bamford’s Woods. In the winter, after a snowstorm, it was a magnificent vista. In the spring, when the hardwoods were getting back their canopy, every day residing beside that woodland was remarkably different than the day before, and the first wildflowers of late spring, the lilacs in small clusters, inspired me to acquire oil paints and canvas in an attempt to tap my artistic skill. It was good I didn’t place all the eggs in that particular basket, as I turned out to be a rather poor painter. In the autumn, it was inspiring and yet sad to watch the canopy change so brilliantly in hue, then cascade to the ground in the first windstorm of October. No matter how it appeared back then, it was my restorative woodland, and it might as well have been ten thousand acres because that’s the way I measured its impact on my creative enterprise. The fact it wasn’t much more than an acre on one urban block never seemed to matter. What did matter was when they decided to mow down the trees to make way for an apartment complex. It marked the beginning of a change in my hometown’s way of doing things, in the name of progress, I have never come to grips with since.
My relationship with nature, and woodland places, began early in life. My sources of inspiration were many, and I studied my environs constantly seeking out the enchantments the writers of fables and tall tales had told me about, in the print of their neatly bound tomes stacked at my bedside. I was born curious and have never believed anything is exactly as it seems, and that it is our mission in life to seek answers and quest constantly, and judge accordingly the mysteries and realities of mother earth.
I have never awoken one morning in my life that I haven’t been prepared to greet either heaven or something parallel, or other. When I awake to look out at a Muskoka woodland, I know it’s the privilege of having a little heaven on earth.
I surely could one day re-awaken to a scene in the afterlife, whatever that might manifest in an immortal sense. I suppose, because of this joyful waking, either dead or alive, I’ve had that heavenly expectation push past the edges of my specific reality. I see and feel aspects of fantasy and assorted other enchantments, even sitting by the window at first light, looking down on what appears to be the tangible, physical, dimensional world as we know it by immersion. I do however, look upon this scene unfolding each morning, with unspecified but ample expectation for some heavenly, supernatural intervention. I’m seldom disappointed.
When my mother Merle used to call me “wide-eyed” and “overly imaginative,” she appreciated that “reality” for me, was always hedged by something else; some extra-sensory capability of placing actuality in the context of Alice in Wonderland, or the Wizard of Oz. I see possibilities that my contemporaries then and now could not. If I was to explain to any one of my friends that I had witnessed a wayward spirit while on a walk through the woods, a ghost in a garden, a wee fairy on a mushroom or a goblin stealing an apple off a picnic blanket, I would be considered delusional and signed up for rigorous therapy. The one true gift I possess in this mortal coil, is the ability to see and appreciate what you can only call the “fantastic.”
I have witnessed and documented more than a dozen ghostly encounters here in Muskoka, and there are another twelve or so I’ve been keeping in the wings, just in case I decide to put a book together of Muskoka’s weird and unexplained mysteries. The problem for me is that I’ve never been frightened by a single so-called paranormal experience, such that it would be pure fiction to apply any tingling, alluring, or unsettling quality to the stories. I’ve had good and positive experiences with all of my so-called spiritual experiences and strange encounters, and I couldn’t imagine doctoring one to frighten any one. I surely feel like telling folks about my own paranormal adventures but just not in a way that will bestow fear and trembling in the hearts of those I tell.
My wife Suzanne said one day that I must be like the kid in the movie who said, “I see dead people.” Problem for me is that I don’t necessarily know they’re amongst the deceased when I meet them on my travels. I have met people on country roads, in cemeteries, in building hallways, on a forest trail, and even at my door here at Birch Hollow that may have been more vapor than substance. I’ve turned around quickly to double-check on my mates when we part, to find nothing more than open space. Only moments after talking to a visitor at a cemetery, I take a glance back and find gravestones and flowers but no other traveler. I’ve met people walking on the shoulder of the road who vanished once we passed one another. I’ve spoken to folks who have just looked at me with nary a nod, and then disappeared into thin air. The fantastic side of this, is that I’ve, at the very least, been privileged to have experienced some of what is referred to as “the paranormal,” without getting beaten, eaten or pulled into the after-life by one of these strange spirited pedestrians.
As a writer my relationship with the curiosities of life and after-life have suited my interests in actuality; I write about a storm crossing a lakeland by being immersed in that scene, not interpreting someone else’s photograph or depending on some other voyeur’s description. I have never once walked through a forest, or down a cobbled lane, that I put expectation or anticipation ahead of welcome reception. I don’t anticipate what I will discover on a lakeshore trail, winding down through an autumn landscape but when it arrives with a spark of enticement, it is the true measure of fulfillment, being entitled to see the dimensions of existence in this world and beyond.
Since childhood I have kept company with the spirit-kind. When I was about five or six years of age, I remember so vividly have a dreadful infection of the lungs that kept me coughing for more than three weeks straight. I would cough so hard and long that it would make me vomit. After a particularly difficult night, only settling long enough to sleep an hour or two, I can remember waking soaking wet with a substantial fever. I was in an out of slumber as the fever raged and then crested into a slow release by early morning. During one of the longer periods unconscious, possibly as the fever broke, I had an angelic vision. I dreamt that I was in the basement of our apartment building in Burlington, Ontario, where there were washing machines and driers for tenants. I remember standing at the bottom of the stairs, on the cold grey concrete floor, looking up at the door. It was then that a brilliant white form took shape, from the door toward the top of what I assume was a table, or washing machine top. The shape hovered there for several dream seconds and when it finally settled, the image of an angel manifested with an amazing plumage of wing feathers and a misty aura making it a soft, cool image versus having any sharply defined lines or features. I knew I was in the company of a messenger not just an apparition for apparition’s sake. This was the real article as far as this five year old kid was concerned.
There was no word spoken, her to me, me to her. I just stared up in absolute awe at what was hovering in front and above the mortal witness. Her soft, kind eyes and hand beckoning mine, inspired a feeling of confidence and security I can not describe with the accuracy and emphasis that it deserves. To this moment I can re-create that state of nirvana and contentment as if she was with me now, drawing me away from the tasks and preponderances of daily existence. It was not a mortal feeling I have experienced again.It was a deep and profound sense of peace and well-being that easily trumps every other emotion….every other sensation.
Most people I relate this story to remark that I must have been on the brink of death, and that the angel was sent to harvest the soon to be released soul. I have no reason to doubt that this was the case, as I battled this respiratory distress. The visitation occurred at the peak of fever, or at least that’s what my mother tells me when I relate the “angel in the laundry-room story.” The fever dropped and it left me exhausted but obviously alive. Possibly the angel had been dispatched to let me know it wasn’t my time, and that I should fight a little harder to hang onto mortal existence. I never felt the angel was there to reap me for the rewards of heaven but rather to ease my suffering, and let me know there was a lot left to experience of worldliness.
From this spiritual encounter onward, I have never resisted or deferred supernatural experiences because frankly I believe, having been in the company of an angel afterall, there are important messages attached to each event and involvement that must be appreciated and understood. That is of course, if you really wonder about the meaning of life in the first place. Most people I know would have pinched holes into their skin trying to awaken themselves, in a similar circumstance to mine, having the uncomfortable companionship of a fully winged angel. What for me was a life enhancing, vision-expanding relationship for those few dreamy moments in childhood, led to a life of appreciation for all those aspects that defy precise definition and explanation.
My favorite author Washington Irving, wrote in the early 1800’s, about the intrusive knife blade of science, dissecting nature to its finest, smallest molecule, to reveal the source of its life and growth. While he was an information seeker, and cherished honest appraisal of life and times, he felt that the botanist was rebuking the mysteries of existence, such that no one should ever believe in the non-science of fairies and their kind, or hold stock in any tale of enchantment and mystery. He rightfully worried that expectation and fantasy had their place in the life and imagination of the modern man, and that the world would indeed be a very dull place if all the traditions and tall tales were exposed as unfounded and fraudulent.
There is no way, no science, no technology great enough to dissuade me from believing I was in the presence of an angel. How could I fear death having witnessed the preamble to heaven-sent charity. I trust that when I inhale the final breath of life, my angel shall return with outstretched hand, to lead me home in peace and all heavenly tranquility.
There’s a magic that exists in everyday life for those who seek it out. Of this potential to explore the fantastic, I will always be an adventurer.

Please check out my other blog at gravenhurstmuskoka.blogspot.com