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Ghost House Books
Ghost Stories of Saskatchewan
Alongside its golden wheat fields and shimmering northern laskes, Saskatchewan holds a rich folkloric collection of ghost stories; until now, no one has paid much atention to these tales.
Geographically, they range from Kenosee Lake, where the resident ghost of a local dance hall had strong objections to renovations, to Shell Lake, where the identity of a mass-murderer was revealed to a group of teenagers through a Ouija board.
In nature, they vary from charming spirits haunting a community arts centre to the menacing presence that drove a Rockglen family to burn their home to the ground.
This eerie collection showcases Saskatchewan's most intriguing ghost stories: accounts of misty apparitions, unexplained noises, violent poltergeists, and startling premonitions. Together, the stories create a fascinating addition to the province's colourful history and disprove the notion that for there to be ghosts, there must be traditional old world settings. Saskatchewan's spirits haunt its weathered prairie farm homes and nondescript suburban bungalows, its overgrown cemeteries and tidy small-town churches, its hospitals and museums, and its very landscape.
It's proven in these pages: you needn't look far to find a ghost in the haunted province of Saskatchewan!
Geographically, they range from Kenosee Lake, where the resident ghost of a local dance hall had strong objections to renovations, to Shell Lake, where the identity of a mass-murderer was revealed to a group of teenagers through a Ouija board.
In nature, they vary from charming spirits haunting a community arts centre to the menacing presence that drove a Rockglen family to burn their home to the ground.
This eerie collection showcases Saskatchewan's most intriguing ghost stories: accounts of misty apparitions, unexplained noises, violent poltergeists, and startling premonitions. Together, the stories create a fascinating addition to the province's colourful history and disprove the notion that for there to be ghosts, there must be traditional old world settings. Saskatchewan's spirits haunt its weathered prairie farm homes and nondescript suburban bungalows, its overgrown cemeteries and tidy small-town churches, its hospitals and museums, and its very landscape.
It's proven in these pages: you needn't look far to find a ghost in the haunted province of Saskatchewan!
143 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 1, 2020
Such a fun read! Based on true stories and just overall enjoyable. I’d recommend for nearly any age group, it’s not overly scary.
August 28, 2023
1.5 star-1 star for still being under copyright=0.5 stars.
Hell she's probably still kicking around, writing these silly restricted-by-copyright books.
in 2022, there was a child having a seizure at a day camp and instead of actually giving them medical attention/bringing the child to the hospital, staff tried to perform an 'exorcism' instead. Similar stories of 'exorcisms' of a gay child by the staff at the #LegacyOfAbuse schools shocked the country.
A normal person in 2023 should probably be shocked by the grotesque religious ignorance that a province like saskatchewan must harbour in order for these events to have occurred. Some people doubted that it could even be possible, that in 2023, such people with such backwards ideas could not only still exist, but be in positions of authority in this province. And that normal people would put up with it, not rocking the boat even in the case when such people engage in blatant, obvious dereliction of care as a direct consequence of their dogma, and children are killed and gravely injured in large number because of it.
But with this book you can point to multiple places where not only has this superstitious garbage happened before(ie it is exactly what you should expect in saskatchewan), but multiple people (including, seemingly, the author) bought into the rationale for it (spirits) as somehow legitimate.
From insinuating the plausibility that merely being an atheist, and being buried in an atheist graveyard without a priest babbling in a dead language to his invisible friend would somehow cause suffering (nevermind the presupposed belief that spirits exist capable of suffering past the grave and exhibiting themselves, as in Tabor) to pre-emptively labelling mysterious deaths as suicide...there's a lot of seriously messed up things in this book (and it isn't the ghosts).
There's about 4 types of stories in this book
1) Electronic and architectural mishaps (which are hardly surprising to anyone who's worked with technology for a living).
2) Tales which are obviously inspired by media or other stories of some kind, which either the author or someone in them clearly just wanted it to be true.
3) clear signs of some kind of mental distress or schizophrenic break (including one where children were in the care of a person undergoing some kind of mental break), especially by people who are under significant stress
4) weird, unexplained lights (and a corresponding failure of theory of mind on the part of some people observing them, which should hardly be surprising - although this study on such failures of theory of mind hadn't been done yet, it cites others which had. Though the author could be forgiven for not knowing about the research into such failures that had already occurred, the university of regina parapsychology professors quoted in the book should have known about it. ).
The whole book really seemed to be along the lines of 'the author wanted to write fiction but had to stay close to the bounds of what other people were telling her', a kind of liminal space between truth and complete fiction.
That said its not entirely without value : more than a couple of the stories came with a historical context, including 4th or 5th hand accounts of events such as the Riel Rebellion, the 1918 Spanish Flu, early days of Tuberculosis treatment in Saskatchewan, and the 1931 Estevan Riot. As such it's a kind of 'second eye view' of events that took place in other books, even some fictional ones giving credible details that are missing from the former, within an otherwise incredible story. Because even if you don't buy the 'ghost' part of the story, the rest of the story details do add up to a perception of real events, and as such it's a valuable account of some parts of saskatchewan history.
You will hear two (questionable) stories from first nation peoples - one for the origin story (probably made up by the french whole cloth, but attributed to the Cree people) of the Qu'Appelle Valley, another attributed to the Assiniboine/Blackfoot (more likely actually from first nations people) of Old Wives lake. The token first nations stories is pretty par for the course, and perhaps roughly proportional to population of the time give or take but it's worth remembering : the last residential school was still operating when this book was published. If you wanted ghosts and tortured 'souls' to be around as badly as Ron Smith of PA did, you couldn't have wanted a better location to find them then those. But, of course, that wasn't really spoken about especially in a for-children book in 90s NDP-run saskatchewan. We were too busy spooking eachother out by these fish tales to care, as a society, apparently. Though to the authors credit they more than hinted at the brutality of the settlers from the hunt of the buffalo to extinction until the late 30s, the story of settler-first nation interaction seemed to stop there.
All over the place, there's missing details that would have made these stories more credible -- missing people involved in the chain of transmission (how did the author learn about them even?), missing dates, missing locations, while the author may have tried to protect the privacy of some of the people involved (virtually everything in the book occurred within living memory of the date of publication, some might even still be living in the same houses even) the net effect was to cast doubt on even the more credible stories.
I remember when this book was published, when I was a child and I can already see some people saying 'it's just a book of spooky ghost stories, like for a campfire for kids'. But that makes the over-reliance on the 'ghost' hypothesis even more worthy of ridicule. I know some of the adults in my life, in the mid-90s bought into the kind of garbage woo that this book represented. Books like this one made their superstition and religiosity more socially acceptable, and as such did more to harm than anything. But at the end of the day, it put pen to paper the depth of what people in saskatchewn actually thought about themselves. It is a book about what they saw, and when we hold books like this to the light with a sober mind we can begin to think about what we see. When we hold up this mirror to ourselves, we can begin to start to fix things here. The ghosts of our ancestors, if they existed, would know we need to do so, badly, if this is who we are.
Hell she's probably still kicking around, writing these silly restricted-by-copyright books.
in 2022, there was a child having a seizure at a day camp and instead of actually giving them medical attention/bringing the child to the hospital, staff tried to perform an 'exorcism' instead. Similar stories of 'exorcisms' of a gay child by the staff at the #LegacyOfAbuse schools shocked the country.
A normal person in 2023 should probably be shocked by the grotesque religious ignorance that a province like saskatchewan must harbour in order for these events to have occurred. Some people doubted that it could even be possible, that in 2023, such people with such backwards ideas could not only still exist, but be in positions of authority in this province. And that normal people would put up with it, not rocking the boat even in the case when such people engage in blatant, obvious dereliction of care as a direct consequence of their dogma, and children are killed and gravely injured in large number because of it.
But with this book you can point to multiple places where not only has this superstitious garbage happened before(ie it is exactly what you should expect in saskatchewan), but multiple people (including, seemingly, the author) bought into the rationale for it (spirits) as somehow legitimate.
From insinuating the plausibility that merely being an atheist, and being buried in an atheist graveyard without a priest babbling in a dead language to his invisible friend would somehow cause suffering (nevermind the presupposed belief that spirits exist capable of suffering past the grave and exhibiting themselves, as in Tabor) to pre-emptively labelling mysterious deaths as suicide...there's a lot of seriously messed up things in this book (and it isn't the ghosts).
There's about 4 types of stories in this book
1) Electronic and architectural mishaps (which are hardly surprising to anyone who's worked with technology for a living).
2) Tales which are obviously inspired by media or other stories of some kind, which either the author or someone in them clearly just wanted it to be true.
3) clear signs of some kind of mental distress or schizophrenic break (including one where children were in the care of a person undergoing some kind of mental break), especially by people who are under significant stress
4) weird, unexplained lights (and a corresponding failure of theory of mind on the part of some people observing them, which should hardly be surprising - although this study on such failures of theory of mind hadn't been done yet, it cites others which had. Though the author could be forgiven for not knowing about the research into such failures that had already occurred, the university of regina parapsychology professors quoted in the book should have known about it. ).
The whole book really seemed to be along the lines of 'the author wanted to write fiction but had to stay close to the bounds of what other people were telling her', a kind of liminal space between truth and complete fiction.
That said its not entirely without value : more than a couple of the stories came with a historical context, including 4th or 5th hand accounts of events such as the Riel Rebellion, the 1918 Spanish Flu, early days of Tuberculosis treatment in Saskatchewan, and the 1931 Estevan Riot. As such it's a kind of 'second eye view' of events that took place in other books, even some fictional ones giving credible details that are missing from the former, within an otherwise incredible story. Because even if you don't buy the 'ghost' part of the story, the rest of the story details do add up to a perception of real events, and as such it's a valuable account of some parts of saskatchewan history.
You will hear two (questionable) stories from first nation peoples - one for the origin story (probably made up by the french whole cloth, but attributed to the Cree people) of the Qu'Appelle Valley, another attributed to the Assiniboine/Blackfoot (more likely actually from first nations people) of Old Wives lake. The token first nations stories is pretty par for the course, and perhaps roughly proportional to population of the time give or take but it's worth remembering : the last residential school was still operating when this book was published. If you wanted ghosts and tortured 'souls' to be around as badly as Ron Smith of PA did, you couldn't have wanted a better location to find them then those. But, of course, that wasn't really spoken about especially in a for-children book in 90s NDP-run saskatchewan. We were too busy spooking eachother out by these fish tales to care, as a society, apparently. Though to the authors credit they more than hinted at the brutality of the settlers from the hunt of the buffalo to extinction until the late 30s, the story of settler-first nation interaction seemed to stop there.
All over the place, there's missing details that would have made these stories more credible -- missing people involved in the chain of transmission (how did the author learn about them even?), missing dates, missing locations, while the author may have tried to protect the privacy of some of the people involved (virtually everything in the book occurred within living memory of the date of publication, some might even still be living in the same houses even) the net effect was to cast doubt on even the more credible stories.
I remember when this book was published, when I was a child and I can already see some people saying 'it's just a book of spooky ghost stories, like for a campfire for kids'. But that makes the over-reliance on the 'ghost' hypothesis even more worthy of ridicule. I know some of the adults in my life, in the mid-90s bought into the kind of garbage woo that this book represented. Books like this one made their superstition and religiosity more socially acceptable, and as such did more to harm than anything. But at the end of the day, it put pen to paper the depth of what people in saskatchewn actually thought about themselves. It is a book about what they saw, and when we hold books like this to the light with a sober mind we can begin to think about what we see. When we hold up this mirror to ourselves, we can begin to start to fix things here. The ghosts of our ancestors, if they existed, would know we need to do so, badly, if this is who we are.
November 9, 2009
The writing style is a little childish (but the stories may be too scary for a child), and the details soometimes sketchy, but I still love a ghost story.
October 15, 2020
I first read this book when I was around twelve, I think - I remember the story of the haunted playground in Saskatchewan sticking with me, and trying (in vain) to find it. I haven't picked it up in the intervening twenty years, and it's sat quietly on my bookshelf since.
Honestly, if I'd gone my whole life without picking it up again, it would've been alright. This book is fine, really, but the writing style is dry. There are very few concrete locations given, so anyone hoping to go searching Saskatchewan at night would be hard pressed to find any of the locations talked about.
It wasn't bad, but it wasn't anything special, and I'm pretty sure the only reason the story of the haunted playground stuck with me all these years is because the woman who relayed the story had been twelve when it happened to her, and that had been my age too.
Honestly, if I'd gone my whole life without picking it up again, it would've been alright. This book is fine, really, but the writing style is dry. There are very few concrete locations given, so anyone hoping to go searching Saskatchewan at night would be hard pressed to find any of the locations talked about.
It wasn't bad, but it wasn't anything special, and I'm pretty sure the only reason the story of the haunted playground stuck with me all these years is because the woman who relayed the story had been twelve when it happened to her, and that had been my age too.
September 13, 2020
My love for ghost stories began as a child and I often return to the classic ghost stories I read when I was little that had me cowering under the blankets afraid to place a toe outside of the covers. I was so excited to read Ghost Stories of Saskatchewan my home province and very disappointed with every story. The child like manner of writing, lack of details and inability to write anything of interest was a complete shock to me. Even if I had read this as a child I certainly would not have been spooked. Sorry to say but some stories were not even a full page, save your money and skip this one.
May 16, 2019
This was a short, fun, and spooky read! It's a quick read, you can get through it in one sitting. I love ghost stories and anything spooky, reading ghost stories from your province makes it even more fun since you are familiar with pretty much every location. Definitely recommend!
Read
November 8, 2020i loved it
August 31, 2013
Read it. Lived it. Scary stuff.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews