Hello, and welcome to Blurry Putos. I'm your host, Heyvid Flora.
On this episode, we welcome back author 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.
Travis, welcome back. You are dangerously close to getting yourself a free
iced coffee. For how many times you've come here. I'll tell you what.
I'm starting to feel like I spend more 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 the latest from you. Tell me a
little bit about it. This stuff as 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 of the other research? It's actually, you
know, a standalone project. I moved to Canada in twenty twenty. My
spouse got a job as a as a lecturer at the University of Waterloo,
which is quite a coup, quite a career coup because this is Waterloo is
basically the kind of the Mit of Canada, or one of them anyway,
So they're they're doing their thing as a computer science lecturer. And I was
part of the reason that I've been able to put out so many books in
the past couple of years is I have, you know, not been able
to work here until fairly recently, and now things are rolling along pretty well.
Also, you know, I'm kind of taking my time about returning to
the everyday workforce. So I moved to Canada and I looked around me and
I said, uh, well, you know, I'm a I'm a researcher
of all things weird. I wonder what kind of weird things there are in
Canada? Sure, And I quickly discovered, you know, as with mysteries
in the midst when I thought, gee, I wonder if fog and clouds
and stuff appear in the paranormal a lot. Once I went down the rabbit
hole, I was like, oh my goodness, there's there's so much stuff
that I literally had to cut large chunks of things out of the book.
You know, for instance, I don't deal with sasquatch at all in this
book, because that's my next book basically is Sasquatching Canada. Yeah, you
know, I chose not to do the the Lake Champlain Monster because that's been
very ably that's being very ably done by somebody else. I also chose not
to do the Window Go for the same reason. And Hauntings that may be
the book after this one, because just in Ontario alone, there are tons
of haunting you know, ghost stories, lots of history stuff. Um.
So you know, I touch on hauntings maybe a little bit in this book
with phantom trains and things like that, but fantom ships, but I don't
go full bore into you know, I went to this place and blah bla
blah, you know, all that sort of stuff. So but even that
then, uh, you know, this book is another book like Mysteries in
the Myths. It has a wide variety of things that would interest people who
are interested in the paranormal m ranging from cryptids through UFOs. I do a
section on fairy lore um and I even close out with a section that's just
basically forty on a phantom fires or what do they call fire spooks fire spooks
um and uh and other rangness like that. So as I got into the
research, I found all kinds of interesting things. The thing that really interested
me, though, was I had to find a number of different sources because
a lot of the stories from Canada you only find with Canadian authors. So
I had to explore a whole new set of writers, some of whom have
written some really fantastic work, but we don't hear much about them in the
United States. So I thought that was pretty cool. Good example of that,
the guy named John Wormes has written a fantastic book called Strange Creatures Seldom
Seen, which most people have probably never heard of. It's a collect he
hails from. I'm not sure whether he's still alive or not, honestly,
but he was from Manitoba, Province of Manitoba. Here in Canada we have
provinces instead of states, and there's quite there are far fewer of them than
there are states. Oh yeah, So he hailed from Manitoba and apparently he
had connections in the First Nations communities of Manitoba, and so he wrote a
book that's a collection of cryptids sightings from Canada, and some of which we'll
probably talk about, I hope we'll talk about later because he gave up some
really interesting stuff. Yeah, but just as an example of you know,
there's a couple of people, a couple 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 had a lot to draw from. Did
you have any other First Nations sources that you drew from or did you find
that, like in many places in America, a lot of the indigenous peoples
don't really like to discuss this kind of lure. Yeah. Unfortunately, because
of the history of European colonization. You know, both in the US and
in Canada, Native people's are just not likely to talk to somebody that they
don't know. Um, So I did not. I do have you know,
of course, the John Worm's book that I just talked about, there's
also some newspaper articles of sightings of things that have been seen, uh,
you know in First Nations reserves they call them reserves up here and reservations.
But directly no, um, I didn't have any any direct sources, but
I certainly do cite Native people throughout the book. Yeah, and not to
mention the fact that a lot of times talking about something taboo like that is
bad as well to certain cultures because it invites that sort of bad negative energy.
Yeah, worms makes the point of saying that, you know, one
of the things that he had to work against and collecting these stories was,
on the one hand, you had these people who'd seen these incredible things and
and almost needed to talk to somebody about it. On the other hand,
the elders were very clear to them that they should just forget this stuff and
walk away that you know, you don't want to talk about this, you
don't want to dwell on it, you don't want to think about it.
You just want to go on about your everyday life and let the mystery be
the mystery, basically, And so they're very torn a lot of times telling
these stories. You know, you see this a lot and amongst the Navajo,
for instance, the Denay when they talk about skinwalkers. On the one
hand, and a lot of these people, not a lot of these people.
Some of these people had these really incredible experiences with things that they cannot
explain, you know. But on the other hand, there is a strong,
strong spiritual taboo about talking about this subject at all because again, as
you say, you know, to name the thing is to attract its attention,
you know, so if they do talk about it, they talk in
circles around it and don't actually and try very hard not to refer to it
directly. You know, they'll talk about how this thing was walking around on
their roof. You know, they're not going to say I saw a skin
walker. You know, They'll they'll say, well, you know, I
was driving down the road and this thing was running along the road beside me.
They won't refer to it directly if they can help it. And we
see the same kind of thing happening in Europe. You know, in an
earlier time, when European people talk about the fairy folk, they would not
name the fairy folk. They had all 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 fairy were you know, happy slappy,
you know, flying around waving their wand and making colors kinds of creatures.
Some of them were pretty dangerous. Yeah, So these folks had learned how
to live with the spirits in their land, and some of the native people
here. Yeah, and this ties a little bit into a part in the
book where you mentioned where you went to 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 kind of one of those outdoors people, you
know. I like to hike and do that sort of fan. I haven't
had as much of a chance to do it lately, but you know,
just because of busy schedule and such. But sure, back in the day
when I lived in Arizona, which was some time ago, over twenty years
ago, you know, I did have a chance to visit the Superstitions since
they were right next to where I lived. Basically I lived in Mace,
Arizona. And yeah, the Apache people of that area had very strong,
no no pun intended superstitions about that mountain range in their legends, at least
in some tribes. It was it was supposed to be the home of the
id Nahin, who were the thunder beings of Apache lore. And there's something
special about that place. I will say that just outright, you know,
just intuitively, walking paths and climbing mountains in that area, there's something different
about the Superstitions. It has a distinct feel to it. That you don't
I've not encountered anywhere else. There are 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 off of a off of a path that I
was following up in the Superstition Range, and the experience was really bizarre because
it was a you know, it's the desert. It's a bright, sunshiny
day. The only time it's ever not bright and sunshiny in the in the
Arizona Desert is during what they euphemistically referred to as the monsoon season, when
they get thunderstorms coming in from the Bajai area. Yeah. Most of the
time, though, you know, the sky is blue and the sun is
beating down on you. I walked into this canyon and it was like I
had walked It's it's a kind of the same kind of feeling that some people
will describe walking into a cold spot and a haunted house. Yeah, it
seemed to me that the temperature dropped, you know, and of course this
is all perceptual stuff, right, but it seemed to me that the temperature
dropped and it seemed darker in this canyon. And it wasn't just the shade
from the canyon walls or that kind of thing. I took about five steps
into this thing, and I had a very clear, intuitive feeling that I
didn't belong there. Yeah, And I was like, okay, all right,
I'm fine with that. I'm backing out now. You know, Sorry
I bothered you and I did, you know. I turned around and walked
right out, And as soon as I 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.
And I'm not surprised because there's definitely some sort of presence up there that
is not not happy, not amicable with people. And I don't know whether
that's just people of European descent or whether it's you know, everybody, Yeah,
you know, but definitely, I I don't really want to know what
would have happened if I had been hardheaded and decided that I was going to
walk back in that canyon. You know, 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 lay up in the book. Oh my goodness.
Um, so yeah, why don't we just talk about the whole book
now? Starting on page one. I didn't focus so much on particular places
because there are well okay, so we can go to one place. Um,
we can go to Nova Scotia. Oh yeah, okay um. And
there is a very good, uh fantom ship story from from Nova Scotia.
It's called the Fantom Ship of the Northumberland Straight and uh, this one doesn't
like a lot of fantom ship stories seem to have like an origin story,
you know, a ship went down, something happened, blah blah blah.
This particular one doesn't have an origin story that any of the authors that I
read could track down. But throughout the course of history in Nova Scotia,
since the settlement time, people have reported 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
rescue team launched from Charlottetown Harbor at one point. And this must have been
some time ago because they talk about rowing 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 is jumping overboard because the ship was obviously lost,
right, But they're they're looking at this. They can actually feel the
heat of the flames as they're approaching this, this apparition. But as they
get closer, suddenly it's enveloped in fog, and then when the fog clears,
it disappears. When the writer who who wrote about this started the section
on this on this Phantom talks about two husband and wife who were staying in
a hotel in Nova Scotia and looked out their window and they saw this,
this, this ship on fire in the strait. They called the local Coastguard,
which handles water search and rescue here in Canada as much as they do
in the United States. They don't do so much law enforcement. They're more
of a search and rescue organization called the local Coastguard. Coastguard asking well,
what are you seeing and they describe this, you know, masted sailing vessel
blah blah blah, it was on fire. So on, and so part
says, oh, that's the that's the 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 a story of a ferry boat, because there
are ferries that go back and forth between Nova Scotia and the mainland that actually
cited this thing, and they tried to get radar on it, and of
course they got no return. But they're all standing there looking at it,
going, oh, it's the fantom ship of straight, you know, because
everybody in the area apparently knows the story. Um. So it's it's a
it's a very uh. It's an interesting I found a bit about the guys
rowing up to it and feeling the heat and that disappears was just wonderfully spooky.
Yeah. So you wonder what it is that actually caused that, you
know, because all of these fantom ships type stories give you the impression that
there was some traumatic event as kind of the stone tape theory that imprinted itself
that keeps replaying over and over under certain circumstan stances. You know, you
wonder what what horrible thing happened that caused this, uh, caused this phantom
to start appearing. But we're talking about 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 runs kind of on the tracks around Wellington,
which is you know town in that area. Prince Edward Island's a little tiny
island that's its own province off the coast of Canet's famous for its red beaches
and for I think it's Anne of Green Gables. But the Phantom train is
spooky because this is a thing that people see on December evenings almost always in
December. Um they will actually see it 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 off the hill where they're looking down on this
thing and get closer to the tracks and where this thing appears, the people
that are close to the tracks can't see 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 and it always stops at the same gate and
then it disappears. So this is interesting because there are other phantom train stories
in that area where the phantom train is cited for a certain period of time,
and then someone dies as a result of 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 particular soul, and then off it goes in
this particular phantom train, though it keeps coming, you know. So some
so one wonders, you know December in 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 are most likely to walk the earth,
right, the restless dead, so to speak. And um, you know,
one wonders if if the you know, the train's not stopping to pick
some passengers, you know, take them 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 where a conductor saw it had everybody bail out
of his own train. Yeah, now that wasn't that was that was in
another area of Canada entirely. That was in Manitoba. Again, I think
it was Manitoba Medicine hat Yeah, pretty sure that's Manitoba. Um. So
in that story, conductor and his fireman are on the train. He looks
up to see a train coming at them 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 to make it off of the train in
time, right, and so fireman bails out. He bails off of the
train. The train comes straight at him and then seems to divert off to
the side and go around him. Except there's no track there. Yeah,
there's no track there. So he's so freaked out about it. His name
was Bob Tooey, if I remember correctly. He's so freaked out by this
incident that, you know, he doesn't come into work for the next day.
It takes him a couple of days to get his stuff together enough to
actually come back to work. And then he promptly requests a transfer to another
line. Apparently, and I don't know if this is a railroad worker superstition
or what, but apparently he saw this as a death portant and so he
was scared to death, right, He thought, sure he was gonna gonna
die in a train accident. So he requests a transfer. He gets a
transfer to another location, another line. I'm still working for the same railroad
and so forth. The fellow who takes 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 to die. And then it goes around them
on a track that doesn't exist. They testified that the train was lit on
the inside and they could actually see passengers walking around inside this train. Right,
so super weird, right, But you know, this conductor tells twoy,
Hey, you know I had the same thing happened to me, and
they're both like, oh, well, I guess they were okay, then,
you know whatever. The sad part of the story is that Bob too
was passed, was conducting one train and this other conductor was conducting the Lethbridge
train, and unfortunately they did end up on the same tracks and had a
massive collision that killed you know, over ten railroad personnel just outside of medicine
hat. Apparently the collision was so intense that said that half the people in
medicine had actually heard heard the train wreck 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 death portant. Yeah, and you know,
again, what kind of a you know, is this a psychic experience that
happens to somebody prior to their death? You know, was somebody trying to
warm them? Um? You just have to wonder what in the world was
going on that caused this very singular experience to happen to two different people who
then ended up running into each other literally. Yeah. Yeah, it's just
a very very strange story. That's you know, now of course a staple
and psychical lore here in Canada. Sure, yeah, and trying to warn
them to try and figure out how to make a train jump the track and
go around the train. You know, we'll just we'll just figure out a
way to switch the other train onto a 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 hears about this section of the book, But
if you think about it, it's really not just because of the immigration,
the settlers, the colonization, but there's a lot of fairy lore in the
book. Did that just pop up out of nowhere? For you? Were
you expecting to find that much? I had some indication. And now you
know, any time that you do research into the strange, you're always going
to have little things that pop up that make you go, oh, wait
over there. And when I did Mysteries in the Mist, I did include
a section on fairy and I did talk a little bit about fairy story in
Canada. And honestly at this point I don't remember which one is, but
that got me a particular source that I referred to. There's a whole section
in the book on the fairy lore of Newfoundland which is devoted to a doctoral
project or doctoral dissertation, and it was done by Barbara Ready, which is
called Strange Terrain. I think I don'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 lore of Newfoundland. But let me back up
for Betty um Okay, the Native people here in Canada have their own fairy
lore. They have they have what they call usually called little people, one
of the one of the terms that's used for them. I'm going to take
a stab at this. I'm not sure 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
that sort of thing, and they're generally depicted as just that being little people.
Um. John Worms has a great story out of Manitoba about a First
Nation's person who ran into not literally really, but who was driving a minivan
if I recall down the road and cited several of these Manichei creatures. But
the way that she describes them, I was thinking to myself, you know,
that sounds a whole lot like the frog man from from Loveland, Loveland,
Ohio, because she described them as being sort of hopping as they moved
instead of walking. They sort of hopped along. They had a skin that
was very slick and smooth and kind of a greenish color or greenish or grayish
color, and very smooth features and not at all human looking. Right.
They they closely resembled the frog you know, you had that sort So I
was thinking to myself, hmm, I wonder yeah, then you know my
mind goes down the rabbit hole and wonders. I wonder if the guy,
the police officer that saw the thing originally was actually a First Nation's perth.
Interesting, yeah, you know, because they do have their own fairy lore.
But as I say, for the most part, the manige she's supposed
to be, or the little people whatever name they go by, because every
tribe seems to have a different name for them. They're frequently associated with stones
as well, so they sometimes are called 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 lot of the fairy folklore of Canada is centered
in Nova Scotia, obviously New Scotland, and then in Newfoundland, which also
has a very strong Scottish Irish settlement proportion there. As I said, Riadi
wrote a whole book about the fairy law of Newfoundland and that fairy lure is
fairy similar to what we see if we go read things like you know,
the Fairy Faith and Celtic Country by Evans 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 stories that you see coming out of Newfoundland are
very similar to the European fairy stories. So you have to wonder, you
know, it's like, okay, did did you know they just attached their
fairy lure to the existing spirits of that land or did they follow them the
follow them? I bring this out in the book. I happen to have
taken some seminars and had some correspondence with a guy named r J. Stewart,
who is, for one of a better term, a fairy seer.
He is an individual who actually works with fairy spirits, fairy people, fairy
folk, whatever you want to call it. And RJ told me he goes
by Bob, but you know, call him RJ because that's how they actually,
that's how he writes. It's like calling me WT Watson, right right.
So RJ actually told me that, you know, of course there were
these fairy healers and fairy seers who lived in Scotland, and of course some
of those people were caught up in the forced migration to the New World UM
ended up in places like Appalachia, UM. You know, the British were
intent on breaking the the cultural history of Scotland, and so they were just
shipping people out in mass and then and then pulling English people in to replace
them. So these fairy seers would get sent over to the New World and
they would lose their fairy contacts for a period of time time, and then
over the course of time those contacts would re establish themselves on that side of
the world. So it's entirely possible that you know, whatever fairies are,
you know, and we can go into you know, you can go into
all kinds of theories about that. But whatever fairies are, uh, they
may have actually followed the people that they knew, um. And so we
ended up with very similar fairy stories in places like Newfoundland. UM. But
they did manage to put their own spin on things. UM. For instance,
you know, it's it's it's known that there are in particularly in the
Celtic Lands, but throughout Europe there it's known that and even in Iceland it's
known that the fairy have particular paths that they trought right and that you know,
putting a house or whatever on one of those paths, UM is really
not a good idea because it's going to result in chaos in your home,
ranging ranging from poltergeist type activities to just bad luck, just general bad luck.
There's a story in Reaity about some people who situated their house on a
fairy path and could not have a child. They kept losing babies until they
moved. Until they moved out of that house and into a different location where,
you know where, they were perfectly successful in having a family. The
other interesting thing about paths with fairies in Newfoundland is that if you go walking
along a particular path that belongs to the fairy, you may find yourself obstructed.
There's a story of a couple of young ladies who were walking from Village
A to Village B, and they came across a forest in a place where
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 they went back to the house that they came
from and they talked to the you know, the authority that the ant or
mother or whoever it was, that the female figure who knew about these things,
and she blesses them with holy water, which is a classic method of
avoiding being taken by the fairy. She blesses them with holy water, and
then she gives them bread, and she 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 all around you. Again, very classic European
motif, where in order to incur the good, good feeling of the local
fairy, you give them all freaks. Right, So they go, they
come to this forest again, they start to you know, handing out their
bread and so forth, and sure enough the forest disappears and they go on
about their way. So you give offering to the local ferry and they let
you pass. But the mom did there, the aunt, I believe it
was an aunt, did comment that, uh, you know, you really
shouldn't take that path, that the north 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 that again. But yeah, but now we're
trying to go from point A to point B the quickest that we can because
it's going to get dark. So we're we're gonna we're gonna do the offering
to the faery. You can get through there there was even uh, you
know, because one of the classic things in fairy lower in Europe was the
idea of a changeling that the fairy would take a human infant and leave something
in its place, an old, wizened fairy that looked like a baby baby.
Um. And the story that Reade has came from one of her students
who collected it from somebody in their their hometown. And this actually happened in
nineteen sixty eight. That these folks had a fine, young, barn little
baby boy, if I recall, and uh, you know, very happy,
outgoing, you know, sort of baby, 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 local fairy lore. They're like, we've been
gifted with a changeling here. So they tried a couple of different things,
but they and remember again this is nineteen sixty eight. Yeah, they ended
up with his baby on a shovel over an open fire and told the they
just held the baby out there and they said, you know what, you
give us our kid back or we're dumping 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 the house. So yeah, and then we
want to get into the whole alien abduction thing, right. You know,
you read Joshua Cutchens Thieves in the Night and you're like, nah, yeah,
okay, so maybe it's not alien the changeling. To to defeat the
changelings, to switch them back, they're always such a brutal Oh yeah,
you have to do I have to do something really nasty in order to get
the ferry to take their their their being back and give you your baby.
You know, you have to hold them over a fire or shove a red
hot poker down their throat or some kind of really awful, terrible thing.
Yeah, or threatened to anyway, or threatened to. Yeah. My favorite
one is boiling eggshells. And it's not even something brutal or something. It's
just a way to trick them because the change links so curious about it.
They stand up and what are you doing? We got you alright, and
give you your baby. That's wild. Yeah, So that that was yeah,
I mean, you know, it's one thing to read about that happening
in the you know, the eighteen hundreds or even the early early nineteen hundreds,
But in nineteen sixty eight, you figure, a, yeah, nobody
believes in that stuff anymore, right, wrong, This stuff is steeped in
this and one other things tangential a little bit to the faith focused stuff.
But something that surprised me was the amount of mur folk sightings. Oh yeah,
that are up there. Did that surprise 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, you know, 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 as being you know, basically spirits of
the water or spirits of the sea or whatever, the type of faery basically.
But I had no idea, first of all, that that it was
fairly common for Scottish people to see these things, um, which I should
have known because I'm a scott My mother was born in Glasgow, you know.
Um, you know, if you look at my DNA, it's like
I'm so norm European. I should I should glow in the dark, right,
Um. But yeah, um, there are sightings of what we would
call murder people both on the on the ocean, um in Atlanta, Canada,
and then more interestingly in the lakes in Canada, which you're not lacking
four yeah, which we are definitely not lacking for. There's there's there's thousands.
Is one of the things that people don't know about. Canada's sent the
second largest country in the world first of all, and it has well over
ten thousand lakes that are over three square kilometers. Yeah. Yeah, so
it's there's just thousands and thousands. Let's say you can't go anywhere with already
into water in this place, you know, I mean because I I'm you
know, I'm in between two lakes here in Kitchener and you know, two
great lakes. Um. And then there's you know Lake Simco that's up off
to the north, and there's just lakes everywhere. So Lake Superior, you
know, which is famous for um, you know, the Edmund Fitzgerald and
the sinking of the Edmondsphere Serald. But there's a story from Lake Superior of
a explorer in the in the colonial period who encountered one of these beings on
the lake. Um was observing for a while and then decided that he was
going to shoot it. So he picks his rifle up and his Native American
companion goes Native Canadian companion goes completely nuts and basically, you know, attacks
him and starts, you know, pumbling him and wrestling the rifle away from
him. He's like, what is wrong with you? And she's like,
are you mad? You know, don't you know what happens if you provoke
one of the gods of the lakes and waters? And he's like, well,
no, what happens? She says, well, you'll find out,
and she bails out. She gets off the boat and leaves. Right.
He and his men were like, oh, okay, wheredo, you know
whatever strange native folklore or whatever you know, blah blah blah, you know,
typical European arrogance. Right, So they set up set up camp on
the shore of the lake and that night 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 is actually rising. The wind is blowing so
hard it's actually pushing the lake up the shoreline toward them, they have to
move their camp back a good distance in order to keep from from losing all
their supplies and drowning. Now, if you know anything about murh folk lore,
one of the things that is said to happen if you provoke one of
these beings is storms. So you know, obviously this First Nations person knew
what she was talking about. Now, the thing that really interested me about
the mur Folks stories, though, was John Worms Again. Wonderful, wonderful
book. I can't recommend this book enough if you're interested at all in Canadian
mysteries monsters, you know, whether it's sasquatch or any of the other weirder
things that hopefully we'll get a chance to talk about. Has a whole section
on First Nations people who encounter mermaids or murman And the interesting thing about this
is that the Native people in Manitoba who encounter these things almost invariably describe them
as being white people with not just white, but with red hair, red
or blonde hair. Yeah, there's there's a story of a young lady who
liked to She and her companions would dive in the water and they would see
who could swim underwater. For the longest, and she was like the champ
at this um. She dove under the water in one of the local lakes
that she was close to at that time, and encountered this, this blonde
mermaid under the water, and she would she would never ever after that go
into the deep water in any of the lakes. Yeah, I mean,
this thing affected her so strongly because you 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 you don't want to talk about, it's on
and so forth. Right, So she encountered this being that was, you
know, basically a blonde Caucasian person from 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 along a path. They spotted you know,
this person in the off the distance. Apparently they only saw like the upper
part of her. And they saw this person sitting on a rock out next
to the lake. Right, It's like, what the heck is she doing
out here? You know, what's this? What's this? What basically,
what is this lone white girl doing the native reserved right. So they take
the path, and the path apparently diverges from the shore of the lake for
a little bit and then comes back down to the shore of the lake,
right around the stone where this person was sitting. And they come out and
they find this redheaded Caucasian and being sitting on a stone, you know,
apparently very contem contemplatively. But the bottom half of this person was a fish,
and when she spies them, she jumps into water and disappeared. Now,
why would First Nations people see Caucasian mermaids? Yeah, that that was
the thing that puzzled me, you know, I mean, I suppose it's
possible that that they you know, that they picked these stories up, you
know, culturally from from the European settlers, and you know, it was
a thing. It was an eg revoire, you know, it's formed of
you know, a sort of a tulpa or fought form um. I suppose
that's possible, or maybe, you know, 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.
You know, and then you can get into the river systems and you
can go anywhere you want. I mean there's a reason why, you know,
birch bark canoes and so forth for so 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
the scene in Peter Pan which I believe he talks about mermaids with the different
color hair blonde, red, maybe a purple one or something. And guess
where J. M. Barry was from? Scotland, Scotland. Yeah,
yeah, yeah, I mean just a little could be a peg on the
corkboard you dover know, you know, I mean yeah, but Scotland is
like the capital of mr folks sidings, they still have them, you know.
Yeah, So it's not beyond the realm of possibility that you know,
if the ferry from Europe, you know, followed their over here, then
maybe the murph folk did too. I mean, we don't know really what
the the idea for, you know, if the native people. I didn't
run across anything that said that the native people had any sort of an indigenous
water spirit, so I just thought that was really interesting. And both of
these sightings were of beings that appeared to be completely solid, you know,
So it's like, yeah, I thought that I had encountered something physical and
I'm sure disturbed the water and things like you know when they jumps in the
water and splash us and all that kind of fun stuff. Well, you
mentioned it. There's such a great variety 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 that you found particularly fascinating or fun to research.
Oh yeah, uh, you know, there's a lot of jokes about
you know, Canadians and beavers and stuff, you know, and moose and
that kind of thing. John Worms gives us some great stories. But we're
gonna I'm gonna back up for just a second. So Worms got interested in
this phenomena of tunnels being found, particularly on First Nation's land, and there
are these mysterious tunnels or about you know, three feet or so why and
very smooth sided. It looked like like lava tubes basically. But there's there's
no volcanic activity in that area, in those areas at all, right,
So he got interested in when where these things come from. He's you know,
he talks to the geologists and he's doing all this stuff and he finally
he says to the native some of his 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 giant snakes live. And he's like what,
yeah, yeah, yeah, we have giants snakes up here. You
know, they tend to live close to the lakes. It's like, uh,
So he started collecting giant snake stories and there are just to back up
again, he talked to herpetologists, the people who do reptiles right, and
they told him there is no way that a snake over four or five feet
long could survive in Canada. Just won't happen. It can't, can't happen,
right, But he had these native people telling him. For instance,
he talked to two firefighters who were out you know, they do preventive fire
maintenance stuff, make firebreaks and stuff like that. They were doing a firebreak.
They are maintaining a firebreak, and they encountered a snake that stretched from
one end one side of the fire at 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, and you know we'd probably be famous. You
know. The other one's like, no, no, no, no,
this is one of those mysteries the elders were telling us about. We're not
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 out of the way, and we're longer than
the boat. There's even a story of a snake that that popped its head
out of the water, you know, near another boat that had antlers.
So it's like there's all of these stories from all through the First Nations areas
in Canada of these giant snakes we're talking 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 them estimated at fifty feet. It's like the
Titana Boas stories that you get out of 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 and how 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 a considerable distance, so big enough to
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.
And again they're very matter of fact about 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 out there in the forest. He does
this thing. We do our thing. We don't bother him. You know,
same thing there there are so worms is like giant beavers. It's like,
oh yeah, we have these beavers that they're the size of bears and
they're you know, people see them ember once in a while, and sometimes
you know, somebody who's out hunting will 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 he not only did these things apparently exist on
you know, these native lands, but um, you know sometimes people will
encounter them. They could be a little aggressive. Yeah, there's at least
one story where a guy got out of the got out of the car.
He thought he was going to go and he saw this beaver off in the
distance, right. He thought he was going to go and get some lunch.
And he comes out with a baseball bat and he's gonna go get this
beaver. And he realizes to get closer to this thing that is bigger than
he is, and it chases it back to the car, you know,
shuffling along behind him, making weird beaver noises right, scarce the but Jesus
out of him. Right, there's a 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 next to it with his arm rap over the
shoulders. This giant beaver that's like, you know, the size of him.
You know, there's stories of you know, Native women out you know,
picking berries, which apparently is a really dangerous occupation because you know,
either you run into giant beavers or you run into sasquatch. Right there are
falling a snake ale out. So they're out picking berries and uh, they
hear something in the bush and they expect a bear to come out, right
because it's black bear country. Oh it 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 and swum away. They're like, okay,
we just saw a giant beaver. Now. The interesting thing about this story
is that there actually was a species of giant beaver called Castords Ohio insus that
lived in that area and a little south about ten thousand years ago. So
geologically speaking, dropping the bucket now, Canada is a place where you could
hide darn near anything. They actually Canada 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 you know, very much alive. Heard of
two hundred in nineteen fifty seven by an Alberta wildlife officer who was doing an
overflight of the air of an area and saw this herd of buffalo running beneath
it, you know, extinct animals. So they managed to hide, you
know, two thousand pound bison in the forest for decades. There's no telling
what's wonder right, It's not above the realm of possibility that there could actually
be a relict population of these Castoridi's giant beavers, right, Yeah, And
what makes it even more interesting is that worms actually saw one of these things.
He had gone to investigate a giant beaver story and decided that he was
going to camp out along the river where this thing was seen. Right.
He didn't think that he was going to see anything really, right, He
just thought, you know, heck, it would be fun, you know,
I'm going to camp out along the river and see if anything happens.
Right. Sure enough, he's sitting there, you know, doing his camping
thing, and this football sized head pops out of the water next to him,
and he says this thing was six or seven feet long without the tail.
I mean it was huge, so giant beavers. That was probably my
favorite story in the book because it's just so it's so Canadian, right,
yeah, and more Canadian if these things were swimming around a maple syrup,
I guess, yeah, absolutely, it was just it was just so very
Canadian that I just I had to laugh, you know, as I was
reading some of these accounts. But obviously people are seeing these things, you
know, And I again, what people don't realize is that not only is
Canada the second largest country in the world, but ninety some percent of the
population of Canada lives within a hundred miles of the US border. So you
have vast swaths of wilderness that are almost completely untouched. You know, if
you want to go there, you have to to rent a plane with pontoons
and fly in and land on a lake because there's no there's no other way
to get there. And that kind of wilderness starts two hours from where I'm
sitting. Wild Um, so it's it's very very uh you know, in
the brush here is dense. I mean, 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 know of the ponderosa pines and pine needle
bed, and there's these big spaces between the trees, right, there's undergrowth
everywhere in the growing season. It's very very dense, very thick, and
you know, difficult to get through. Um. So you know, it's
kind of discourages people from going tramping around there unless there's a good trail to
follow, right, perfect though to hide. Oh yeah, these cryptids maybe
relict all kinds of stuff. And again to the listeners, it's it's there's
such a dearth of topics that Travis covers in the book Cryptids. As we
mentioned just some of the mysteries, my favorite part, the forty Ana stuff
that you talk about, some of the 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 scratch the surface. So I do encourage people
to check this out. It is something that, as you point out in
the book, Travis, a lot of Americans don't aren't aren't very privy too,
because it's only Canadian writers that are writing 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 with from the Shag Harbor incident. You mentioned
Falcon Leake, which I've covered before, and the origins of the Old Mary
Celeste even but there's so many more things that people have I would bet never
heard of. So yeah, it's it's a great work that you've put together
here, And I bet you could do several volumes if you really wanted to,
if I really wanted to. Oh yeah, you know, like I
said, I've got I have one project in the works right now. The
lore of Sasquatch is rife with stories, you know, that are told by
American authors, and so the only only place in Canada that exists for these
folks for the most part is British Columbia. And what I discovered very quickly
when I started doing research on Canadian strangeness was that I couldn't find I can't
think right off the top of my head of a province that hasn't had a
sasquatch sighting. Yeah, maybe none of it, Maybe none of it up
in the Arctic area, unless you want to blame the Angie Cooney Lake disappearance
on a never know. But so My 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's not much cognizance of it south of the
border. It's like it's almost like a lot of people in the United States
believe that, you know, once you cross the Canadian border, there's just
this giant ice flow that stretches up to the art and you know, and
nobody lives up here, right Um, I apocryphal story, but I've been
told that, you know, Canadian border security has actually had people driving into
Canada in the summertime with cross country skis on the top of their cars because
they thought they would need them up here. Wow. Um, and not
not really. It's it's pretty warm here right now. So he's saying this
while sitting there in a sleeveless T shirt. By the way, Yeah,
yeah, it is pretty warm to day. It's the twenty seven degrees celsius.
So yeah, we think that comes out to about eighty four Fahrenheim,
which not as hot as some places in the US, but it's it's pretty
warm. It's up there, it's warm to us. Yeah, it's enough
for me too. Yeah, I had to move to the mountains. Yeah.
So it's very much the case that a lot of these stories, you
know, like I said the two, there's there's plenty of great hauntings up
here too. Yeah, that I'm probably am going to look at at some
point as well. But it's very much the case that it's understandable because there's
a ton of stuff in the United States to investigate, but there's also a
ton of stuff up here to investigate, and I'm looking forward to getting my
nose into some of that. Excellent, excellent, Well, I appreciate you
taking the time to come and talk with 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. So at this point I have three books in
print, nonfiction books in print, I should say, the Phantom Black Dogs,
Walker's a Liminal Way, Mysteries in the Mist, Missed Fogs and Clouds
in the Paranormal, and then this new 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 you were a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, they are
available on Kindle Unlimited. If you want to interact with me, you know,
on a more personal level. I'm available on Facebook, Twitter, and
Instagram. That that that picture thing. I have WT Watson author page on
Facebook. I'm at Twitter at wt Watson two. And then the weird one
is Instagram. It's an old handle of mine. It's Coreneers see you are
you and I R sixty So you can 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. Oh nice. So that's always fun to have
a chance to talk to somebody who's seen 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 to do 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 on Blurry Photos. Well, thanks so much
for having me. Thanks once again to Travis for stopping by. I'll have
links to where to find the book in 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