More Maritime Mysteries: Everyone Has a Story

Joanne Wotypka is a branch library assistant in the Cameron Library and
the University of Alberta.

Bill Jessome has a way with ghost stories. This sequel to Maritime
Mysteries (1999) features another great assortment of supernatural tales
from the East Coast. It seems that almost everywhere in the Maritimes
has one or two creepy stories associated with it, and most Maritimers
seem to view the paranormal as a part of everyday life. A personal
favorite is “The Haunted Privy,” which reinforced my childhood
notion that outhouses can be dubious places at best (certainly Crapper
John found this out the hard way). The stories involve roadside spirits,
vengeful ghosts, haunted ships, poltergeists, and all manner of strange
goings-on, all told in a wonderful around-the-campfire way.

Some of the stories are long and intricate, and others comprise only a
few sentences, but all are bound together by the spirit world and
Jessome’s narrative web. Even well-known tales, such as “The Curse
of the Mary Celeste,” are told in a fresh way that makes them just as
eerie as when my parents heard them as children. The opening story,
“The Thing in the Attic,” is quite frankly terrifying, and by the
time the book finishes off with “The Devil You Say,” one realizes
that starting this book late at night perhaps wasn’t such a good idea.

More Maritime Mysteries is a fine collection of regional stories that
both illustrate the unique culture of Atlantic Canada and draw that
region into a larger sphere of ghostly happenings that are part of the
human (or unhuman) condition.