The family moved into Riverwood, a large house built around the turn of the twentieth century on the south bank of the Ottawa River, in 1963. One warm summer day, the girls’ father was cleaning the second-storey windows from inside the house while their mother was gardening outside. The mother took a short break and walked around the perimeter of the house, enjoying the natural beauty of the family’s new property while surveying her husband’s work. Sunlight reflected brightly off the freshly cleaned windows, but then she noticed one that didn’t appear to have been touched. The window was covered in dirt and old, tangled cobwebs.
“You missed the round window,” she told her husband when she found him inside.
He didn’t know what she was talking about. Not only had he methodically gone room to room cleaning each and every window on the second floor, but he wasn’t even aware of the window his wife was talking about. It didn’t exist — at least, not to his knowledge. But she insisted that there was a round window and he had somehow missed it.
They walked outside and around the house. Sure enough, at the back of the house there was a round window and it clearly hadn’t been cleaned in a long, long time. But neither parent could think how to get to that particular window from inside the house. It was almost as if it existed on the outside of the house only.
They walked upstairs and guessed that the window must be behind a wall near the back staircase. They rapped on the wall and realized that their knocks sounded hollower than they should. After giving the matter a little further thought, they decided to break through the bathroom wall to see what — if anything — was hidden on the other side. They never could have guessed what they’d find.
Having used a sledgehammer to break a hole in the wall large enough to step through, the parents were amazed to find a secret room that had been sealed off from the rest of the house some time ago. It was very large with a high ceiling, and had empty shelves and cubbyholes. The room might have been used as a storage closet for the maid who at one time lived in Riverwood, but no one could figure out why it had been sealed up and forgotten. It was as if a previous owner wanted to hide the room, or forget it was there. But now that the parents had discovered it they decided to affix a door to the hole they’d created and turn it into the mother’s sewing room.
That’s when bad things started happening.
Lindsay and Kyle felt an evil presence inside, particularly upstairs near the secret room. The air would suddenly and unexpectedly grow very cold and dark, and one of their two younger brothers, who was only five years old at the time, told his sisters that he heard things moving in his room in the middle of the night. He’d often wake up to find that his dressers, which were far too heavy for him to lift, had been dragged across the room.
Lindsay and Kyle shared a bedroom, and one night an unusual and eerie sound woke Lindsay. They sat up in their beds and, after realizing that neither girl was dreaming, watched in mute horror as their closet door slowly slid open. Then someone pulled the string that turned on the hanging lightbulb with a sharp click-click sound. Both the bulb and the string swayed side to side in the air, but the girls could clearly see in the light that no one was in the closet. But something was in there, and whatever it was didn’t like the way the clothes were arranged. The unseen presence began sliding the girls’ clothes frantically from side to side, then took dresses off the closet rod and placed them back in different positions.
“Are you awake?” Lindsay whispered.
“Yes,” Kyle responded.
“Are you seeing this?”
“Yes!”
Hearing her sister’s terrified voice in the dark and knowing that she was also watching the activity in the closet made it more horribly real for Lindsay. The ordeal lasted for thirty minutes.
When they needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, all four of the children often saw a small blue light travelling down the hallway just in front of them. The light would sometimes move in an erratic pattern and other times bounce through the air. The girls came to think of it as “Tinkerbell.” The light would pass under a thick curtain that hung across the hallway, and when the children pulled the curtain to the side they would see the light pass beneath the door of the bathroom — the same bathroom where their parents had created a doorway to the secret room. But when the children entered the bathroom the light would be gone. Despite the fact that they all saw the light on many separate occasions, none of the children discussed it with each other until they were much older.
As creepy as the paranormal activity in Riverwood had been, it was about to become much, much worse.
Lindsay returned home after school one bright, sunny winter day and entered her bedroom. She stopped dead in her tracks and screamed at the top of her lungs. In the centre of a large, ornate mirror on the wall was a brass lion sculpture. It was glaring out at her from within the mirror with a look of intense hatred. Kyle rushed to Lindsay’s side and asked what was wrong, but when Kyle looked at the mirror all she saw was her own reflection, her sister’s and the rest of the room.
Lindsay and Kyle outside of Riverwood
The lion appeared in the same mirror again and again throughout the winter, and finally Kyle saw it too. Being a brass statue, it never moved while the girls looked at it, but every time it appeared it wore a different expression. The one consistency was that its expression was always angry, mean and scary looking. Then, six months later, the lion stopped appearing in the mirror.
Late one night the following winter, one of the girls woke up with a bad feeling in her gut and immediately roused her sister. Outside their bedroom window were two red eyes staring in at them. All they could see were the eyes — the person’s (or creature’s) body was hidden in the darkness of the night. And whatever was out there looking in at them was somehow floating in the air, for there was nowhere to stand and nothing to hold on to outside that particular window. The red eyes — the sisters came to think of them as “devil’s eyes” — appeared four more times that winter, either in the middle of the night or at twilight.
The family moved out of Riverwood in 1968, but they could never forget about the old home. Haunted houses have a tendency to haunt their occupants for the rest of their lives, long after the terrifying events are distant memories.
Read the whole chilling series.
Haunted Canada: True Ghost Stories
By Pat Hancock
ISBN 978-0-7791-1410-8
Paperback, 112 pages
A collection of chilling true ghost stories, from all across Canada, to send shivers down your spine: from poltergeists who terrorize hunters in a remote cabin, to a man who gets frightened to death in a graveyard.
Prepare yourself to be haunted!
Haunted Canada 2: True Tales of Terror
By Pat Hancock
ISBN 978-0-439-96122-6
Paperback, 120 pages
These true tales of terror from all parts of Canada will chill you to the bone. Strange fires break out, serpents rise from the waves, and giant beasts lumber through the trees. Ghostly forms drift by and eerie discs lower silently from the sky.
Prepare yourself to be haunted!
Haunted Canada 3: More True Ghost Stories
By Pat Hancock
ISBN 978-0-439-93777-1
Paperback, 128 pages
Ready for more true ghost stories? Somewhere in Canada, a strange light glows near the water, a chain rattles in an abandoned cell, and footsteps scurry across an empty room. Somewhere a headless woman wanders the streets, a blood-covered face appears in a mirror, and the eyes of a statue flutter open.
Prepare yourself to be haunted!
Haunted Canada 4: More True Tales of Terror
By Joel A. Sutherland
ISBN 978-1-4431-2893-3
Paperback, 128 pages
eBook ISBN 978-1-4431-3377-7
These chilling true tales of terror from across Canada will have you sleeping with the lights on. A phantom dog leaps out from t
he darkness of an abandoned hospital, red eyes glow through a misty graveyard and unseen hands push, grab and trip visitors to a museum.
Prepare yourself to be haunted!
Haunted Canada 5: Terrifying True Stories
By Joel A. Sutherland
ISBN 978-1-4431-3929-8
Paperback, 128 pages
eBook ISBN 978-1-4431-3930-4
These terrifying true tales from across Canada will make your blood run cold. Televisions and radios turn on and off on their own at a remote inn, disembodied legs descend the elegant staircase of a castle home and a phantom ship emerges from the fog off the coast of Newfoundland.
Prepare yourself to be haunted!
Haunted Canada 6: More Terrifying True Stories
By Joel A. Sutherland
ISBN 978-1-4431-4878-8
Paperback, 128 pages
eBook ISBN 978-1-4431-4879-5
These terrifying true stories from across Canada will keep you up at night. A supernatural sea hag haunts an eerie marsh, a used book conjures up a ghostly figure, phantom hands terrorize children in a school playground … Prepare to be haunted!
Haunted Canada 7: Chilling True Tales
By Joel A. Sutherland
ISBN 978-1-4431-4881-8
Paperback, 128 pages
eBook ISBN 978-1-4431-4882-5
These chilling true tales from across Canada will haunt you long after you’ve turned the last page. A ghostly woman roams a remote island in search of her missing finger, a haunted house terrorizes its occupants but won’t let them go and a river wraith causes the untimely death of all who set eyes on it. Prepare to be haunted.
The Unexplained: A Haunted Canada Book
Edited by Janet Lunn
ISBN 978-0-545-99314-2
Paperback, 160 pages
Fifteen shivery stories, including tales by some of Canada’s top writers:
* Joyce Barkhouse
* Hazel Boswell
* Karleen Bradford
* Jean Brien
* Brian Doyle
* Monica Hughes
* Jean Little
* Janet Lunn
* Andrew MacFarlane
* L. M. Montgomery
* Kit Pearson
* Ken Roberts
* James F. Robinson
* Sharon Siamon
* Carole Spray
Haunted Canada: Ghost Stories
By Pat Hancock and Allan Gould
ISBN 978-1-4431-2894-0
Paperback, 176 pages
eBook ISBN 978-1-4431-3307-4
A ghoulish face in the window … A throaty whisper … A boy possessed … The thrills and chills of these fifteen haunting stories will make your hairs stand on end. Think you’re ready? Then turn down the lights, lock the door and prepare to be spooked!
For Haunted Canada bonus material, visit www.scholastic.ca/hauntedcanada.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joel A. Sutherland is an author and librarian. He is the author of several books in the Haunted Canada series, as well as Be a Writing Superstar, Summer’s End and Haunted, a series of middle-grade horror novels. His short fiction has appeared in many anthologies and magazines, alongside the likes of Stephen King and Neil Gaiman. He has been a juror for the John Spray Mystery Award and the Monica Hughes Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy.
He appeared as “The Barbarian Librarian” on the Canadian edition of the hit television show Wipeout, making it all the way to the third round and proving that librarians can be just as tough and crazy as anyone else.
Joel lives with his family in southeastern Ontario, where he is always on the lookout for ghosts.
PHOTO CREDITS
The Etobicoke Poltergeist: Courtesy of Milena Rzepa Sztainbok
Skeleton Park: Queen’s University Archives, Kingston Picture Collection, Locator #V23, Cem-Fron-7
The Hilltop Grave: Murray Lundberg
Never Ever Come Back: Courtesy Town of Stony Plain
Fright at the Museum: Susan Mcarthur Letellier/Dreamstime
Phantom Flight: Shawn Edlund/Dreamstime
The Death Mask: County of Oxford Archives
Voices in the Vaults: Shankar S/Flickr
Mandy Lives: Quesnel & District Museum and Archives
The Body in the Brook: Courtesy of Kevin Barrett, Nova Scotia Communities, Culture & Heritage Department
To Die in Durham: Whitby Public Library Archives Image 07-001-005
Secret Room: Courtesy of Lindsay Damecour
Scholastic Canada Ltd.
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www.scholastic.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Sutherland, Joel A., 1980-, author
Haunted Canada 8 : more chilling true tales / Joel A. Sutherland ;
illustrated by Mark Savona.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4431-4883-2 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4431-4888-7 (ebook)
1. Ghosts--Canada--Juvenile literature. 2. Haunted places--
Canada--Juvenile literature. I. Savona, Mark, illustrator II. Title.
III. Title: Haunted Canada eight.
BF1472.C3S985 2018 j133.10971 C2017-906941-1
C2017-906942-X
Cover credits:
Photo © abdreiuc88/Fotolia.
Illustrations by Mark Savona.
Text copyright © 2018 by Joel A. Sutherland.
Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Scholastic Canada Ltd.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read this e-book on-screen. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher, Scholastic Canada Ltd., 604 King Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5V 1E1, Canada.
First e-book edition: May 2018
Haunted Canada 8 Page 8
