Ghost Stories of Ontario

Daniel M. Kolos is president of Benben Books in Orangeville, Ontario.

John Robert Colombo, a veteran collector of Canadiana, left the nearly
70 tales that appear in Ghost Stories of Ontario as he found them:
either as previously published or in the original words of the many
respondents who answered his requests for ghost stories. Not many of the
latter are good storytellers. Colombo found it necessary to add to each
piece a detailed preface that, more often than not, gives away the punch
line of the story or provides a mood-setting value judgment absent in
the story itself; many stories are made redundant by these commentaries.
This collection, which is neither complete nor authoritative (the
stories are not researched but taken at face value), appears to be an
excuse for adding another volume to the Master Gatherer’s credit.

The Saskatchewan volume is another in the Hounslow series on the
occult. While Colombo strays from the ghost genre and includes every
sort of paranormal experience, Christensen sticks to the subject. She
also relates each of the 34 stories in her own words and often provides
details of her research. Christensen has a feel for the eerie and is a
good storyteller. The weakness of this volume is its use of journalistic
postscripts to generate mysteries not evident in the stories themselves.