Curious Canadians

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

When two teachers ran across Sophia McLaughlin’s tombstone in
Lunenburg, they were deeply touched and felt the need to write about it.
In 1879, a coroner’s jury had decided that Sophia, at 14 years old,
had died of a broken heart after being wrongly accused of theft. From
this sad beginning in a Nova Scotia graveyard, the authors spent seven
years travelling Canada searching out the curious stories of eccentrics
and impersonators, heroes and con artists, people driven by obsession
and by love, that make up this collection.

It is a book to dip into. Here we can read the story behind sights we
may have seen such as the Mushrow Astrolabes in Newfoundland or the
house in British Columbia built entirely of glass embalming bottles, or
about such adventurers as Don Starkell’s extraordinary canoe voyages
to the Amazon and the Arctic.

Some stories may seem familiar—such as those about Grey Owl, who was
really an Englishman; Dr. James Barry, who was really a woman; and
Ambrose Small, whose disappearance has never been solved—but they
probably contain something we don’t know. The Titanic story takes on a
new twist with the tale of a man who rowed in Lifeboat Number 6. Some of
the stories may be known only to locals, such as the intriguing tale of
Moose Jaw’s network of tunnels that held Chinese immigrants and
Prohibition gangsters, and a chilling account of a phantom train outside
Medicine Hat.

The 34 stories, all of which are accompanied by black-and-white
photographs, remind us that we have many strange tales to tell. They
will surely whet any reader’s appetite for more odd discoveries.